Setting up Version Control systems in Linux

Version Control System fits the definition of a friend in the common adage "A friend in need is a friend indeed " , for a software coder , who writes millions of lines of code over his lifetime , most of the times updating / improving his code .

An orderly life certainly warrants the need of keep a check of all the "Kodak Moments of life" , when a certain combination of the code worked brilliantly , bringing a smile on the developers face.

Over the course of time , the code is updated for getting a bigger smile .. but yeah sometimes one is not able to remember or browse through the whole source code to find out as to where the error has crept in from . And any frantic search of the Kodak Moment in the memory just does not seem to work out .

This is where the CVS comes to the rescue , as it acts as the database , which has stored the snapshots of the code , perhaps with a comment about those glorious days of the working code .

Just download the base-lined version and voila , it works . Now its just needed to compare what the updated code has more in it , that caused the error.

Subversion is an alternative to CVS that is growing in popularity.

apt-get install subversion subversion-tools

Creating a Repository :

Create a directory by the name repo/ under your home folder say /home/rajesh/

This is the place where we would be placing the repositories of all the projects that I am working on . This is different from my workspace directory.

timesheetapp is the application that I am working on and I want to keep a repository of that .

svnadmin create ~/repo/timesheetapp

The contents of the folder would look like this :
rajesh@rajesh-desktop:~$ ls -lrt /home/rajesh/repo/timesheetapp/
total 24
-rw-r--r-- 1 rajesh rajesh 229 2010-09-09 12:29 README.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 rajesh rajesh 4096 2010-09-09 12:29 locks
drwxr-xr-x 2 rajesh rajesh 4096 2010-09-09 12:29 hooks
drwxr-xr-x 2 rajesh rajesh 4096 2010-09-09 12:29 conf
drwxr-sr-x 6 rajesh rajesh 4096 2010-09-09 12:29 db
-r--r--r-- 1 rajesh rajesh 2 2010-09-09 12:29 format

For optimum use of the subversion its advisable to use create a directory structure

mkdir timesheetapp
mkdir timesheetapp/trunk
mkdir timesheetapp/branches
mkdir timesheetapp/tags

svn import . file:///home/rajesh/repo/timesheetapp --message 'Creating repository for timeSheetApp