SVN for deployers? / Defect coordination

[Stefan Sperling]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 11:00:14AM -0500, Ed Matthews wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
>  
> 
> I was excited to find the book about SVN. However, the section on common
> workflow seems to address only developers, not the broader context of
> defects-their detection, defect id creation and entry, and then somehow
> including the defect id as a marker in SVN both before making code changes
> and then when deploying changes from the repository for only some subset of
> defect code that has been checked in.
> 
>  
> 
> Have I missed the where to RTFM about this broader context? How is this list
> coordinating the Google List with SVN? 
> 
> How do you currently coordinate the Google defects capture with SVN for this
> book? 
> 
> (I did a fair amount of googling defect / ticket system and SVN but haven't
> really seen process/procedure, only that various ticket systems seem to have
> some kind of integration support to SVN). 
> 
>  
> 
> In the "Basic Work Cycle" how do you include the id from a defect in SVN?
> With branches somehow? 
> 
> 1. Update your working copy.
> 
> . svn update
> 
> 2. Make changes.
> 
> . svn add
> 
> . svn delete
> 
> . svn copy
> 
> . svn move
> 
> 3. Examine your changes.
> 
> . svn status
> 
> . svn diff
> 
> 4. Possibly undo some changes.
> 
> . svn revert
> 
> 5. Resolve conflicts (merge others' changes).
> 
> . svn update
> 
> . svn resolve
> 
> 6. Commit your changes.
> 
> . svn commit
> 
>  
> 
> ??Migrate code for defect ids 1, 4, 7 to an environment. Do not migrate code
> for 2,3,5,6. How identify 1, 4, 7 in SVN? 
> 
>  
> 
> Many thanks,
> Ed

Hi Ed,

Subversion is a pure version control system. It's a successor to CVS,
and was designed to improve upon CVS's features. But it's not anywhere
close to being a comprehensive software lifecycle management suite.
It's a lot more leightweight than that.

As you've found out, a lot of issue tracking system have support for
integrating with Subversion.
Chances are you can combine Subversion with your favourite issue
tracking system. There are also software suites that include Subversion
and build upon it to create a more readily integrated solution.
These suites include features such as version control, issue tracking,
discussion forums, wikis, mailing lists, etc. There are commercial,
proprietary options, and freely available open source options.
I won't name any options here because I don't want to create bias
towards any particular piece of software. But if you search the internet
for options you should be able to get a list very quickly.

Some technical background:
Subversion allows repository administrators to set up communication to
other software such as issue trackers from what is called "commit hooks".
Whenever a change is committed to Subversion, a script installed by the
administrator can run and trigger arbitrary actions such as adding a
comment to an issue in an issue tracker, or changing a ticket's status.
This often relies on developers mentioning ticket IDs in the log message
of their commit, but there are even tools that provide help and automation
for adding such information to log messages.

If you have more questions, I suggest you head over to the Subversion
users mailing list. See http://subversion.apache.org/mailing-lists.html
You are much more likely to find people who have answers to your questions
on the users@ list than on this list. This list is about development
of the Subversion Book, not about Subversion usage questions.

Best wishes,
Stefan