I don't understand something that is happening on my Eclipse and I am wondering if this is my Eclipse problem or if this is actually a feature. I have a trunk and a branch. On the repository they are the same so no changes have been commited since I created the branch. After making the branch I switch on my workspace the project from trunk to branch. Then I started working and changing on the branch. Suddenly I wanted to see something on the trunk because I got lost in my changes. So I switch to the trunk. I was surprised when Eclipse did not remove my changes and it was as if no switch was made. The changes continued being there.
Is this normal?
Can someone explain?
Thanks,
David
This is perfectly normal, and the way the svn switch is suppose to work.
Here's a common scenario. You're working on trunk, and realize that your changes should be applied to a branch instead. You simply do switch and you are now on a new branch and your changes are now applied to the new branch. Many times, I'll be working on one stream (a branch or trunk), and realize that my changes are too experimental and big to go into the current development stream. I'll create a new branch and switch to it.
There is no reason with gigabyte fast disks, and gigabyte networks to be skimping on working directories. I tell developers to dedicate a working directory for each project and branch. Otherwise, if they keep switching back and forth between various development streams, they're going to forget and do development in the wrong place.
With almost any svn client you can:
check out a project
make some changes
switch back and forth to any truck/branch
preserve your changes along the way
In other words, nothing specific to eclipse here.
see: svn switch
I prefer to have separate eclipse projects per branch and also change the project name to something like myProject-24 so when the branch is checked out again down the road, the default project name has some branch identifier on it.
This also enables you to make changes on a per branch level and do single commits across the branches; even if they're in discreet eclipse projects.
The functionality you are looking for can be reached by doing the following
Right Click on the folder that should be replaced
Click on "Replace With ..." from the context menu
Click on "Branch ..."
Select the branch you want to take a look at from the dropdown box
ATTENTION: This is replacing your local changes. It is not possible to reverse this.
Greetings
Tobi
Related
Imagine you have a bunch of source files in a branch that you are working on that are add/modified/deleted. Then suppose you decide to halt development on that branch for a while and go back and work on something else in the trunk. You are NOT merging the branch at this time.
Normally I would check in all my changes to the branch then do a Team->Switch and select the trunk and start work. However, I noticed that if I didn't check in my changes, Subclipse happily changed the subversion URL of my working copy to trunk and left all my changes intact.
My question is this: Did Subclipse do a merge for me behind the scenes or did it just switch the URL to trunk and do an update... presumably in an attempt to avoid losing my changes?
If it's the former, I have a new-found respect for subclipse/subversion. If it's the latter then, it seems like it should be an illegal operation to do a subversion "switch" while you have a modified working copy because you are in effect trashing the trunk!!
You can absolutely switch when you have modified sources. That is a perfectly normal use-case. Imagine you were working on trunk but not finished with your work and had to work on something else. The solution would be to create a branch for your new work, switch to the branch, commit to the branch (which will get rid of the local modifications) and then finally switch back to trunk.
This is how Subversion is designed to work.
Suppose I have the following senario:
Trunk is my main development line where programmers commit to when done.
Branch V1.0 is a branch I created when releasing version 1.0.
The programmer is working on the trunk but needs to switch to the branch in order to fix bugs.
When switching back to the trunk Subversion will give me the latest in the SVN repository which does not include the recent changes.
So, in order to switch he will have to commit what he has because otherwise the changes are "lost". I know they are still kept in the local repository but it would still mean restoring them one by one once he switchesback.
Am I missing something here?
Edit:
Now I am thinking down these lines:
Each programmer would have his own "private" development branch off of the trunch. He could commit to there whenever he wants. When he has finished what he has written he can them merge it into the trunk. He starts again for the next assignment.
If at any point he is required to fix a bug in some other release he can just commit to his own private branch, fetch the odl release and fix it. Then, after committing the changes to the fix, he can easily switch back to his own development branch.
Would that work?
I think that subversion is not thought for switching as you described. A solution would be to have two workspaces, one for the branch and another one the trunk, so you can switch from one to another without problems. I know it is not a nice one.
Consider switching to a version control tool that is better suited for your approach. My own suggestion is Mercurial, coupled with MercurialEclipse. The only drawbacks I'm aware of are that Subversion is better suited to store binary files and that Mercurial's subrepositories don't work so well as Subversion's externals.
In Mercurial your programmers would be able to commit their changes to their private repositories, merge and commit locally again, and then push the resulting changes to an official repository, from which other programmers would pull them into their own private repositories.
The best solution for such purposes is to have two separate working copies. One for working with trunk and one working with the branch.
We are in a transition from source control Clearcase to SVN and we cannot find a similar workflow in svn as we had in Clearcase.
In Clearcase we had one integration view from where the builds were done. Each developer also has its own "developer view" where development is done. Periodically (when some work item is done), code from dev views is delivered into integration view. Then both views were synchronized together and we were good to go. The "developer view" can be used for years in this scenario.
We try to achieve the same workflow in SVN using branches but we are having the following problem:
If, as mentioned in the svn doc, we
merge into the trunk using the
--reintegrate flag, our branch become useless and need to be
recreated. It is not pratical,
especially when using Eclipse (we do
not want to recreate our workspace
or even deleted the "old" project
because the launch configuration is
lost).
If we merge without that
option, we end up, few commit/merge
later with various unexpected
conflict like "local obstruction,
incoming add upon merge" even if the
file was added only once.
So my question is how can we have one branch per developper? If it is not possible, how do you work with Eclipse, SVN and branches. One last thing, we want to keep the trunk pristine, so working directly in the trunk is not and option :-)
Thanks for your insight,
-Martin
Generally, a branch per developer is frowned at and is definitely not the recommended flow in SVN. In DVCS like Git, Hg, developers can have local branches to work on and such branches are cheap. Maybe you can consider using git-svn or even shift to Git / Hg and have less painful merges.
I'm using svn for the first time, to maintain a custom version of Wordpress. I'm using the subclipse plugin in eclipse. The time has come to merge the changes in the latest release of Wordpress with my customised code base.
I have tried creating a branch and adding the new Wordpress release there, then performing a merge. No changes were made however.
Could someone walk me through the setup of project like this? I fear I am missing something basic.
Thanks.
This is assuming you merge from branch (containing the latest version of Wordpress) to trunk (your customized codebase).
(Make sure that you have committed everything you need into branch.)
Team --> Switch to another branch/tag/revision... your working copy to trunk (the target of your merge operation), and resolve any conflicts that come up at this point.
Team --> Merge opens a dialog where you will be performing the merge operation. Change the "From" URL to reference branch (the source of your merge operation, i.e. what you want to merge into your working copy). "From Revision" should point to the revision in branch where you want your merge operation to "start" from - typically the revision that was last merged in from branch to trunk (or most likely the head revision in your case, if you really want to merge just that latest changes in branch).
Set "To Revision" to point to the latest revision in branch (= the head revision).
At this point you are ready to perform the merge - Dry run command lets you preview what will happen during the merge, and Merge will perform the actual merge.
Once the merge operation has been completed, you need to make sure that all changes that were performed against your working copy are ok, and resolve all conflicts.
When you're done with resolving conflicts and reviewing the changes, commit the changes to trunk in a single commit operation. For your own convenience, it is strongly recommended that you add a commit message where you specifically state what this commit is for ( = merging revisions from X to Y from branch to trunk, what was the purpose, etc.).
Hope this helps.
Converting wordpress project to vendor branch procedure
If you are using svn for the first time I suppose you have not started with a clean wordpress copy, branched from there and edited the branched version, have you? ;)
If that is so you might have a problem at your hands.
Background
Unlike "regular diffs" SVN merge does not compare right-side code/folders with left-side code/folders.
While svn merge might fall back to a diff-like mechanism if it does not find a history, I would not recommend relying on that as it can be quite prone to unneccessary conflicts.
SVN Merge is used to reproduce changes that have been recorded in the SVN history. It is like telling a painter "Hey you know how this picture looked before you added that tree on the hill? That Tree was great! Look here i've copied the same base picture but now it's with a sunset. Can you paint the same tree again but on this picture with the sunset?"
The painter might be able to reproduce the tree because he knows how he had done it. He might even have a draft somewhere.
The picture, that is wordpress. The painter, its svn with you commanding it. The tree thats your modifications. The picture now sunset-themed is the newer wordpress version.
What most likely you did is copy wordpress vanilla into your svn, modify it, work with it.
To stick with the picture example, the history would contain commands like "copy whole picture, add tree, add leaves".
Now you bring a new version of wordpress, a new picture so to say and put it besides your older modified version. The Problem is, you human and smart know its quite much the same picture and even though the newer verison is different you just have to copy the tree, SVN does not have that knowledge. For SVN your wordpress 1.7 folder (modified) is completly distinct from wordpress 1.8. They share no history because nothing in SVNs log indicate it. SVN is a bureaucratic snob isn't it? ;)
Now what people do to allow svn to maintain that historic connection between wordpress 1.7, your modified 1.7 and the new 1.8 is they use branching right at the beginning of their works.
So you would start off with a clean 1.7 wordpress in a "vanilla-wordpress" folder, store it in svn and branch it to, say, "my-modified-wp". There you hack away until you feel like updating wordpress from upstream. People then download the latest wordpress copy overwrite their vanilla wordpress and merge the resulting changeset.
In the picture example commands would be these:
"Buy original picture
copy original picture as my picture
draw tree on my picture
draw sunset on original picture (someone else did that for you, aka update)
*reproduce* sunset on my picture too"
You can cleanly reproduce the sunset because you know how the picture looked before the sunset was applied.
Your problem though is that you did not start that way off but edited on your downloaded wordpress right away. So your newer copy of wordpress can not be easily associated with your modified version.
One way to establish history relations
download the **exact** wordpress version you started your project with
Put it into /vendor/wordpress/current
invoke "svn copy http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/vendor/wordpress/current http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/vendor/wordpress/1.7.1" to tag the import.
invoke "svn copy http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/vendor/wordpress/current http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/branches/my-new-modified-wordpress" or whatever your project/WP-edition is called.
Now comes the trick part
Scroll back the svn log of your "old-modified-wordpress". The one that you did not branch. You have to find the first revision AFTER your initial import of the old wordpress. Once you found that revision you take its number and use it in the second of these two commands:
change into a local checkout of "/branches/my-new-modified-wordpress"
issue "svn merge -r **4**:HEAD http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/my-**old**-modified-wordpress". If 4 was the first revision during which you made own modifications.
You are telling svn the following: "Take all changes in my old branch between revision 4 and NOW and reproduce them on my new branch."
If all works out you should have two identical branches. the old-modified and the new-modified with the slight difference that the new-modified has a solid history with your "/vendor/wordpress/current" branch.
This ancestry allows you to contunously do the following:
Download the wordpress version you wish to upgrade too and **overwrite** /vendor/wordpress/current
invoke "svn copy http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/vendor/wordpress/current http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/vendor/wordpress/1.9.3" to tag the new version.
change into local checkout /branches/my-new-modified-wordpress
issue "svn merge http://svnserver.tld/repositorypath/vendor/wordpress/current"
profit
This procedure I describe with less storystelling at the link allready. But before it can work you have to establish the ancestry relation between the branches.
Subversion svn:externals file override?
I know it has been alot to read :). If you plan do soem drawing, think of "change commands" not states and you'll be fine.
C
So my team is just starting to use branches on our project, and we've run into an organizational issue concerning the way Eclipse/CVS handle branches and projects. My question is this:
Is it possible to ensure that multiple projects are always synched to the same branch with CVS in Eclipse?
Here's a simplified scenario:
Two projects: ProjA and ProjB, and two branches: Dev and Release.
So let's say both projects are synched to Release in my workspace, and I decided to add a new feature. I only anticipate that this feature will touch ProjA, so I naively branch only that project to Dev. So now my workspace is inconsistent.
After a few hours of work, I realize that I need to make a small change to ProjB, so I pop open the file in question and make my change, forgetting to sync it to Dev.
Later, after my changes are complete, I commit them. Now, I've just committed the changes in the first project to Dev, and the changes in the second project to Release. Woohoo, broken build!
A solution to this problem would either:
not have let me sync the two projects separately
not have let me commit to two branches at the same time
Now, in the real world, we have about 30 projects, and a number of developers working on feature branches, many of whom seem destined to use branching to break the build any way possible. I'd like to remove some of those ways.
Is changing vcs an option? Having recently transitioned at my work from cvs to mercurial, I don't think I could go back. I think that any of mercurial, git or bzr would solve those issues.
After much trial and research, it seems that because of the way branches are handled in CVS (that is, on a per-file basis), a scenario like the one I seek is not possible (at least not without some tool special-built to this purpose).
We ended up just going with a soft solution: By changing the color and format of the CVS label decorations in Eclipse to something more striking and isolated, it's much easier to casually identify which branch a project (or file) is synched to.
The Eclipse settings are found at Team > CVS > Label Decorations > Text Decorations and General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Basic > Decoration Color.
And, of course, implementing some best-practices along the way.
There are two approaches you can take here.
Name your Eclipse projects after the branch they're created. So if you're working on a feature branch for ticket number 123 dealing with ProjA you check out your Eclipse project as ProjA_123 (or ProjA_Dev if you wish). You can call your release branch ProjA_Release.
Alternatively you could maintain separate Eclipse workspaces for each branch.
So long as you have some system to identify which branch your working checkout is from, you should be fine.