Using SVN Productively

Most of my students won't have used a version control system before, so I thought I'd better write on the best way for them to use it.

First off, it takes a bit of discipline to use SVN productively. If you do it right, then you'll be able to work on your project at home, at school, on your laptop, and always be sure that you have the most current version of your code.

Do it wrong, and you'll find yourself with three different versions of the code and faced with the problem of merging the changes.

So I'll lay out some general rules for using SVN:

1) Before you start to work on your code in a particular location, right click on the project name in Eclipse and select Team->Update To HEAD. This downloads the most recent version of the files from the SVN repository, making sure that you'll see any changes you made on other machines.

2) When you're done with a particular change in a file (e.g. you're satisfied you fixed the bug, or the functionality you've added works), right click on the file and select Team->Commit and then enter a description of what you changed.

3) Before you stop working on a particular machine, Commit anything you've changed, even if you're not done with it yet. This makes sure it'll be available on other machines when you update them.

If you keep to these rules, you shouldn't have any trouble with needing to merge different changes to a file, or possibly losing changes to a file. At least not with a single developer project, which is what you'll be doing in the course.