On Mar 29, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Rob McBroom wrote:
On Mar 29, 2007, at 10:19 AM, Ethan H. Darling wrote:

So, my question is...  "What is SVN, can I really use it to manage a production website, and what is the best place, resource, book to get information on how to install, configure, and use it?"

I deal with several web sites and I use subversion to manage them. It's great at what it does, but…

In my opinion, it's completely the wrong tool for the "transfer these updated files to the web server" part of the process, which I think is what you're after. I still edit all web site files remotely using Cyberduck (same clunky workflow as Transmit), Samba, DAV, SSHFS, etc.

The problem, if you care, is this: If you have a copy of the files on your local machine and you want to make some updates then push them to a remote machine using Subversion, you have to "commit" your changes*. Most of the changes you make are small and stupid and not worth committing. I also prefer not to commit changes until after I've tested and know that I didn't break anything. Why keep track of mistakes, right? But of course, when dealing with web stuff, the changed files need to be on the server in many cases in order to be tested, which if you're using subversion to "transfer" them, brings us back to committing files prematurely.

Many people on this list continue to suggest Subversion as an answer in a situation like yours, so maybe I'm missing something. If so, I'd love to hear what it is.

* Also note that this just puts the changes into the repository. It doesn't actually transfer updated files "as is" to the remote machine. The repository itself is a sort of database and useless to a web server, so you would need to have a working copy on the web server also, and have subversion update that copy after each commit in order to view the files there.

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Rob McBroom
<http://www.skurfer.com/>
I didn't "switch" to Apple... my OS did.

Well, the real trick to all this is that I do all of my development and testing locally. Afaik, all Rails developers do.
It's now even possible to have a complete asp.net local testing setup on your machine with parallels.

You have a very valid point, and you're right, tons of people just aren't going to reproduce their entire application locally and must therefore edit files on their testing or staging servers.

Frankly, editing files remotely on a Mac just really sucks. It's something that the Finder should make easy, but the Finder is just horribly limited and old.
(It might suck on a PC too, but I remember it being easier than on a mac, built-in FTP in the Explorer without freezing the machine. It's been a long time since I've had to develop on a PC and Vista is out now too, so who knows)

Dreamweaver handles it by making and managing a local mirror and uploading when you save (or manually).
We could recreate that functionality in TextMate, but I think it is well beyond the scope of what TextMate is for.
Transmit is capable of doing exactly that, there's even a command to docksend the current local file and mirror it up to the server.
I think the mistake that a lot of people make when editing files remotely is just doing them one at a time.
Making a local mirror first gives a much better experience. You don't get any of that horrible slowdown when TextMate rescans your project, etc...

Interarchy has some cool local mirror handling.
Then there's rsync and all kinds of other stuff.

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