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SVN Questions (slightly off topic)

thinkdreams Member
in General support
Specifically for Tristan-

I'm on Dreamhost, and I've been toying with using Subversion for some time to keep track of my changes to web projects. I know your stuff is pretty well taken care of.

My question. Maybe a basic question, but I've never really gotten a good answer. What is the difference between svn export and svn update? My guess is that svn export is used for when you have a completely empty location you want to fill with files from a repo. svn update is when you already have stuff there that you want to refresh with the latest, correct?

And where would you go to look for help on Subversion? I have the latest svn-book, and I'm reading that, but do you have any other suggestions for getting started with SVN? My ultimate goal is to have my zen cart on SVN, as zen cart is such a @#!& when it comes to upgrading.

Comments

  • trisweb Administrator
    Good question :) `svn update` works on a "working copy" of a repository, which is the code you've checked out with `svn checkout` -- it's got a whole bunch of those `.svn` folders if you look closely, which store information about your working copy, revisions, repository info, and a lot more. Update is used to refresh that with the latest from the repository.

    `svn export` is completely different, and you shouldn't confuse the two. Export just gets all the files from the repository without any SVN metadata attached. What you get from export is not a working copy, and can't be checked back in if you make changes, but it is a fresh clean copy of the files in your repo, usually for release or actual usage (because you don't want .svn folders all over the place in your production folders -- they take up space and aren't needed at all).

    So that's the difference. Feel free to ask more questions :-)
  • thinkdreams Member
    Cool. I'm trying to get a handle on the more Linux-y style commands, as I am currently dual-booting Windows XP and, and after my Red Hat Admin Training in March for my company, I plan on going completely Linux.

    So I'm going down the list of apps I have to replace with open source versions, and I'm trying to get to know the "other" way of doing things so I'm not so windows-dependent.

    Thanks!
  • trisweb Administrator
    Cool, sounds like a good plan.

    I've got Ubuntu on my 2nd drive here but I hardly ever boot into it. As sorry as Windows may seem sometimes, it just works when I need it to, without having to spend 2 hours a day under the hood installing or configuring software. I can do it, but I just don't have the time these days...

    So I spend most of my linux time these days on this server (also Ubuntu) :-) It's fun.
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