SubversionandCGIProduction

From Odwiki

NOTE: Work In Progress!

Subversion Overview

Subversion came about when a great cry was raised over much of the "baggage" that CVS had accrued over the years. (See this excellent overview of CVS and the CGI environment: it's recommended to read through this in order to have a proper perspective on Subversion). The venerable CVS has been in constant use for many years, but it has a few vestiges of it's roots that can become problematic when implementing in a digital content medium. While not intended for this market, many of the changes that Subversion implemented directly address some of these issues. It's worth noting that subversion was always intended to "be a better CVS" - not to redefine the versioning paradigm. Having said that, it's worth investigation because it's powerful, it's fast, it's flexible - and it's free!

http://subversion.tigris.org/

Usage

It's very, very hard to beat this excellent, freely available online book, so I won't try!

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

This will walk you through installation, basic usage, administration and advanced features at an excellent pace.

Advantages in the Pipeline

First off, all of the power of CVS is available to you. In addition, the ability to directly store "diffed" binaries is an obvious advantage. There are numerous other abilities and features, such as using an "http://" protocol for checking in and out, and database storage, but these are all well defined in the introduction of the book. Some of my favourites are "deletes" actually *deleting*, saves are "atomic", and no more Attics!

Disadvantages in the Pipeline

Subversion is relatively new, while CVS has been around for many years. Consequently, there are far more "front end" GUIs for CVS, and tools in general. You may also find that Subversion depends on a number of other packages(such as Apache if you want http serving and Berkeley database), and getting the version you want of it running on your system may involve a little legwork. Of course, newer releases of Linux are including this package as standard now, so this may not be an issue.

Tortoise is a Gui that does support Subversion and can be found at http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ Its really easy to setup and nicely integrated with subversion.

What's next?

Hmmm...support for Subversion directly from Houdini? Not as hard as one might think! Think about this: set up your scene as a repository - all maps, shaders, OTLs and other assets are part of the repository. While you are working, you no longer save with Ctl-S - instead wire a script to F1 which saves out your file, over-writing the previous version, and then committing that version to the repository. Perhaps F2 would be wired to a version that calls a popup entry field, and you can enter an optional description of the changes you've made. I can see the majority being quick F1's, but every once and a while enter a meaningful comment and you'll be able to browse a history of your scene, with comments, and pull in whichever version you wish! Because Subversion's "diff" save for binaries is just as efficient as it's text version, you will use a lot less disk space and load times will be that much faster.

Personal tools