I recently started making the move to using Subversion as my version control system.

Since migrating to the Macintosh, I had not gotten CVS up and running. My old system (in the dark PC days) was to have the CVS repository on my working machine, but on a different physical hard drive. On the new iMac, there was no second hard drive. (I do have Firewire drives, but leaving them connected seems to spoil the beautiful simplicity of the G5 iMac.)

Most everything in my old CVS repository is for the Palm, or some other source code that I don’t need to migrate to the Mac. Switching to Subversion seems to make sense now.

I downloaded the pre-built binaries from Martin Ott’s page. Quite nice of Mr. Ott to make those available.

Changes I made:

Note that the location of the global config files is NOT where the SVN docs seem to indicate. On my system using the Coding Monkeys install, they were at: ~/.subversion/config

Made sure that global ignores were enabled in the config file. Added “build” to cover the build sub-dir in an Xcode project. Need to keep in mind that this might be a problem in other contexts! Might be some better way to accomplish the goal of not having any of the build stuff included…

global-ignores = .o *.lo *.la ## ..rej *.rej .~ ~ .# .DS_Store build

Although links to the executables were created in /usr/local/bin, that directory was not on my default path in the shell.

The solution is to either add that directory to the path, or add the subversion bin directory /opt/subversion/bin.

Some general notes:

Creating the repository. I used the FSFS store instead of the BDB.

>svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs ~/svnrepo

Import a directory.

>svn import -m “New” . file:///users/donmeyer/svnrepo/code/objc/projectname/trunk