soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

… just delete/rename ~/Library/Application Support/ZigVersion/UrlList.plist

I had been experiencing continuous crashes with ZigVersion for probably a month or so, so at the end I just managed my svn stuff from the command line. It is a bit tedious sometimes so I thought it would be nice to find a fix!

The side effect of this is that you'll lose the recent servers list, but I think that's part of the problem: I had so many working copies in the list that I guess ZigVersion just confused itself (specially because I had done nasty things such as putting working copies inside folders which weren't checked in but were inside another working copy, etc).

I think I'm going to move to Subversion all the websites which still aren't versioned. It's so annoying to change things locally, test locally, then you want to upload them to the server and there's always some change which it's not updated and booooom!

With SVN (Subversion) it's much easier. You continue building your stuff locally and when you're happy with it, check it into your Subversion server. Then you log into your hosting server with ssh, and in your /web directory do something like svn co http://mysubversionserver/project/trunk . - that will associate the /web directory with the subversion repository path /project/trunk. Meaning that each time you do changes and commit them to SVN, you can get all the changes rolled to your server by simply connecting with ssh and running svn up in the /web directory.

Obviously for doing this you need a hosting account with ssh access. Most of them do not have such thing, and I really can't understand how could I survive without ssh access before. Even for simple things such as deleting a directory, ftp's and sftp's are terribly slow :-)

There's more sophisticated people which are using build makers like ant or the famous capistrano to deploy stuff but for the moment I still don't need that degree of complexity; it's not worth the effort yet.

I wanted to have a good repository of my code projects just in case something bad happens. Searching info here and there, I found the following pages useful for setting up my own repository in textdrive, and also installing and configuring the appropiate software on my mac.

So first thing was creating the repository, from the webmin administration tool (in textdrive, of course)

Then I found this cool page by Josh Buhler, explaining how to install all the svn tools for Mac Os X. Once all is instaled, I jumped to this textdrive forum thread on using subversion on TXD, which is a bit old but gave me the idea of how to refer to the svn paths. I thought it was something like svn://…. but it was http://… (no wonder why it gave me a timeout each time I tried to access it!).

With it, I could go to the terminal and make the first import and put the first version in my repository! I did it as it is explained in this good article at macdevcenter: Making the Jump to Subversion. Basically the most important step here is making a copy of your source code before importing to the repository, then import it, rename the first folder as Myfolder_beforeSVN, and check it out again in the MyFolder folder - so you get the contents again from the repository, but this time they are all marked like subversionized, and if you look carefully, you'll note their icon exhibits a little check box - to make clear they are under the subversion domain and they are up to date.

If you are a bit curious and run ls -la in your code folder, you'll note there's a little new (and hidden) folder called .svn which contains something like this:

drwxr-xr-x    12 sole  sole    408 Jan 22 18:57 .drwxr-xr-x   119 sole  sole   4046 Jan 22 18:57 ..-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole    118 Jan 22 18:57 README.txt-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole     78 Jan 22 18:57 dir-wcprops-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole      0 Jan 22 18:57 empty-file-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole  31254 Jan 22 18:57 entries-r--r--r--     1 sole  sole      2 Jan 22 18:57 formatdrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 prop-basedrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 propsdrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 text-basedrwxr-xr-x     6 sole  sole    204 Jan 22 18:57 tmpdrwxr-xr-x   114 sole  sole   3876 Jan 22 18:57 wcprops

I think that it is where subversion holds all the info for the files and so on, like the CVS folders which are created in each folder when you use CVS.

And that's all! Now there's no excuse for not being a bit less messy when it comes to having backups and a clean code. Hope you're lucky with it all…