My pet Tortoise named SVN

The Goal

Become familiar with SVN, a subversion control system, and familiar with using Google Project Hosting, with its tasks and procedures.


Download the Program


First I had to download an SVN program software, our professor recommended TortoiseSVN for windows users. TortoiseSVN is an automated revision control, version control, and source control manager.

TortoiseSVN version 1.5.3

The Process

Creating a Google project site was rather moderately simple. I first started by going to the Google code page; then proceeding to the Project Hosting page, from there I started a new project. After reviewed the notes from Prof. Johnson, I started to fill in the text boxes with the required information from his example.

Once the project page was created, I continued to setup TortoiseSVN on my local computer to upload files to the project page. At this point I would have had a rather difficult time getting things to work, but luckily my professor had some very good instructions on the setup. When using the “checkout” option with TortoiseSVN on the folder that contains the files to be uploaded, you must make certain that the link is an https web URL for the project repository. This is because, if you use a normal http web URL you can only view and make local changes, but not commit the changed file to the project repository. From there I was able to commit my copy of the stack program.

Another thing I created was a new Google group; this group will serve as a place for discussion that relates to my project page. Each discussion topic is made each time a version of the project is created from the project page.

Testing how TortoiseSVN with Google Project Hosting worked, I made some javadoc changes to one of the files that were committed to my project page earlier. After the changes were made, I committed the file with a brief description of what I did. It then created a new version of the project in the project page, and also took into account of what specific file was changed and what was different from the previous version of the project.

Thoughts

Using TortoiseSVN combined with Google Project Hosting is a really good experience for me; I see that it’s useful for creating open source projects or just simple group class projects, using these combined project tools will make processing and control easy. It was also awesome seeing the Project Hosting page and the Group Discuss page were both linked to each other, after making the right settings. The most astonishing thing for me was seeing how all this works, the process of multiple programmers and logs taken with each version. The funny thing is that there was nothing lame or boring about this tortoise, but I do wonder how hard it’ shell is.