DREWspective

In contrast to my unfinished rant about Propel, I just love Subversion.

It is, however, a bit of a bitch to get working how I wanted it. Actually, that’s not quite fair; the problem lay with TortoiseSVN, which I shall explain later.

For the uninitiated, Subversion is what’s called a version control program: it keeps track of the different versions of files you manage. Think of it as a kind of incremental backup system, or the Reviewing feature in Word. It’s mostly used for developing programs, and because of the nature of the app, it’s widely used for developing web sites and web applications.

I’m using it for building my project Foley, and so far I haven’t done much with it except try to set it up. It’s primarily a Unix resource, but there are (not very many) ways of setting it up on Windows, provided you have an NT-based operating system (Windows 2000 upwards).

Recently I set up a testing server on my laptop, and wanted to use my main computer as an SVN server. Having installed Subversion and TortoiseSVN on both computers, I thought it would be a straightforward process.

Not fucking so.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but basically the only way of connecting to the repository on the main computer that worked was using SVN from the command line; TortoiseSVN refused to do the work. I’m still not sure why.

The only thing to do now is move the repository to somewhere other than the testing server’s document root. Is this possible?