Version control allows multiple people to work on exactly the same piece of code without overwriting each others’ work. Each person works on their own copy, and, once they have it finished and debugged, they merge it back into the main repository.
If you are looking for a good client, check out Wikipedia, which has a nice list of suggestions on their SVN page. We list our top choices below with a quick 1,2,3 walkthrough on how to use them.
Subversion client for Windows personal top pic – Tortoise SVN
It is a direct plugin to Windows Explorer and is pretty much completely seemless. No scary command line, no typos, just right click and do what you need to do.
Click here for a 1 Click Setup of SVN + Tortoise
Subversion client for Linux/OSX Personal Top Pic – ???
Peter, twisted man that he is uses command line SVN. Regarding a GUI – anyone want to clue us in? Do people even program on a Mac?
Detailed instructions for TortoiseSVN/Windows
- Create a working directory for your project
- Check out the project to this directory.
* right click your folder
* select ‘SVN Checkout’
* URL = “svn://some.machine/book”
* OK - Update/Commit whenever the project is in a release-worthy state.
* right click the working-copy folder
* select “SVN Update”
* You may need to resolve conflicts if the Trunk has changed.
* select “SVN Commit”
**enter a descriptive log message**
* OK - Repeat Step 3.
Detailed instructions for SVN commandline (Windows/Linux/Mac)
- Create a working directory for your project. We’ll use ‘~/book’.
* mkdir ~/book - Check out the project to this directory.
* svn co svn://some.machine/book ~/book(note that capitalization is important on Linux)
(‘co’ is short for ‘checkout’) - Update/Commit whenever the project is in a release-worthy state.
* svn up ~/book/(‘up’ is short for ‘update’)* You may need to resolve conflicts if the Trunk has changed
* svn ci ~/book/ -m “” (‘ci’ is short for ‘commit’)
- Repeat Step 3.