SVN, what works.

As I sit here waiting for a meeting I thought I would share some thoughts about SVN and some of the positives and negatives that I have had with using it.

In case you don’t know SVN is a very useful piece of software that you can download for free for PC (tortoiseSVN), and there are a few for Mac as well (SCPlugin). Versions is better for Mac but you have to pay for it. It is a great tool if you are building projects as a team or you work from several different locations and need to have a central location for all the files. Think of SVN as a central file sever for storing all the files for your projects. The special concept about SVN is that it will compare files, update files and delete/add files as needed according to your project needs all in one click of a button.

I know, your thinking I do that already with my hard drive or FTP’ing stuff to a server but what if there are two of you working on a file like an ActionScript file. Who overwrites who? How do you combine them without copy and pasting? Some SVN’s will do this easier than others but that is the point behind SVN is the ease of merging the file into one and only changing what has been changed and adding what needs to be added. That is probably confusing so let’s try this.

Say my colleague made some changes to a file late one night that I didn’t know about, and then I come into work and start working on the same file without knowing he made any changes to it.  I could possible either screw up what he had done or just waste a lot of time writing code that he has already written. So in comes SVN. Now when I come into work the first thing I do is update my folder structure from SVN and grab all the changes that he has made. It will show me if a file has been changed and if it has I can merge the file with my old one, compare them to see what has changed, or just update the file and keep trucking.

It is a very powerful and useful tool, but there are some downfalls. I have used SVN inside eclipse and there has been some times where I have clicked on the unlock feature inside of SVN and it reverted all my data to the last revision that was saved on SVN.(that sucked) Then there are the times when SVN doesn’t like .fla files for some reason. If there are two of you working on one .fla then there might be a problem. The way around this is to make two versions of the same fla and when all the changes are done move all the movie clips to one and then save it.

For the most part SVN has been a great tool and it has saved me on more than one occasion. Like when you screw up your files and can’t figure it out, SVN to the rescue. Just revert your information to the last revision and Presto! your information is back to the way it was when you started.

I would highly recommend trying and using SVN for your projects and on the plus side most hosting servers have it now as a one click install so that is really nice and easy.

Try it out and have fun. Let me know what you think.