We’re looking at moving from a check-out/edit/check-in style of version control system to Subversion, and during the evaluation we discovered that when you perform an Update action in TortoiseSVN (and presumably in any Subversion client?), if changes in the repository that need to be applied to files that you’ve been editing don’t cause any conflicts then they’ll be automatically/silently merged.
This scares us a little, as it’s possible that this merge, while not producing any compile errors, could at least introduce some logic errors that may not be easily detected.
Very simple example: I’m working within a C# method changing some logic in the latter-part of the method, and somebody else changes the value that a variable gets initialised to at the start of the method. The other person’s change isn’t in the lines of code that I’m working on so there won’t be a conflict; but it’s possible to dramatically change the output of the method.
What we were hoping the situation would be is that if a merge needs to occur, then the two files would be shown and at least a simple accept/reject change option be presented, so that at least we’re aware that something has changed and are given the option to see if it impacts our code.
Is there a way to do this with Subversion/TortoiseSVN? Or are we stuck in our present working ways too much and should just let it do it’s thing…
The best way around this is to educate the developers. After you do an update in TortoiseSVN it shows you a list of affected files. Simply double clicking each file will give you the diff between them. Then you’ll be able to see what changed between your version and the latest repository version.