Question

What is the high level overview of everyday TortoiseSVN usage. For example, I have created an online repository. From my understanding, the functionality I want is for every change I make on my local machine, the change should also occur online. What makes this process happen in terms of TortoiseSVN functions? For example in what order do I checkout/update/commit etc…

Could somebody just give me a step by step process on how they work off of a repository?

Answer 1

There are two repositories, and they are not the same.

There is the “server repository” which is the collection of every “revision” of the project, for every moment in time from the creation of the project to right now.

There is the “client repository” which is where you will make your changes, which contains one snapshot from the “server repository” and one possible collection of changes that you intend to eventually put in the server repository.

Neither of these should be the actual location of where the information is made public for use. For example, if you are maintaining a group of web pages in SVN, neither the client repository or the server repository should be the same directory as the web pages served out by your web server. To “put into production” the contents, one should check out a new clean client repository copy, and then “build” a distribution, and place that on the web server. “Building a distribution” could be as simple as building a zip file minus the .svn directories; but, it is an important step as if you use a client repository you run the risk of preserving change in the web server that isn’t checked into the svn server. I digress, but that’s because the term “online repository” sometimes means greatly different things to experienced SVN users and people just starting out with SVN.

I’d point you to the svn book at red-bean.com, but someone’s already done that. Read the first few chapters. It does an excellent job at giving the SVN overview. If you have a more specific question, after reading those chapters perhaps you will be able to frame it in terminology that will get better, more specific responses.