Looking an svn_dump file in the mouth

from the horse’s mouth.. by Sarah McD on flickr

Crispin, the web master at the orchestra I play in (the Cambridge Concert Orchestra) is leaving us (and the UK) and so I’m taking over as web master. Crispin managed the website versioning in Subversion and so handed over the SVN dump file. I’m more of a Team Foundation Server  person, so it’s been a bit of a journey to get Subversion working on my Win7 box, though now I come to write some notes just-in-case I need to do it again the steps look easy. Big thanks to Dinan and a cast of thousands on the interweb for their help!

STEP ONE

I started off trying Subversion via Linux, using either VMware + Ubuntu or Slax to get Linux up and running on my Win7 box. However that seemed overkill, so I looked around for Windows versions of Subversion (there’s a list on the Subversion site here: http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html#windows) and settled on SlikSVN

STEP TWO

Once SlikSVN was installed I made a suitable directory, put Crispin’s SVN dump file in it, and from the command typed

>svnadmin create repository
>svnadmin load repository < svn_dump

That gets me the SVN repository unpacked. Next I need a working copy and so this was the command:

>svn checkout file:///C:/Users/timregan/CCO/repository website

That’s it for the command line.

STEP THREE

To edit the files it was easier for me to use Visual Studio 2010 as it’s powerful and I’m familiar with it. I used a Subversion plugin for Visual Studio called AnkhSVN which I installed.

Under the view menu AnkhSVN includes a repository explorer and a working copy explorer. I’m yet to figure out how to get it so that double clicking an shtml file in the working copy explorer opens the file in that instance of visual studio, and marks it as changed if it’s edited, but I’ll note those tips down to when I’m done.

The SVN book online is also fantastically useful: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-book.html