Recovering a Deleted File from Subversion

This comes up every so often, and I always have to look up how to do it. So for future reference here's a quick howto on finding and recovering a previously deleted file from a Subversion repository. This assumes that you know roughly the name of the file, and roughly where it was in Subversion.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 4: Pragmatic Version Control

This is the fourth and final part in my series of posts covering command-line Subversion. In Part 3 I promised to return and talk a little bit about using version control sensibly and appropriately, so this is me finally getting around to it.

A lot of these points aren't specific to command-line Subversion, or even Subversion in general, but are based on a good few years of working with version control, and may just make your life a little bit easier all the same.

Git for Subversion Users

As readers may have gathered from previous blog posts, I'm something of a fan of version control and of Subversion in particular.

In recent months it has become increasingly difficult to miss the buzz surrounding Git, a version control system originally developed by Linus Torvalds to aid development work on the Linux kernel. Git is gaining a lot of ground, with a number of major projects (for example Perl, Samba and Wine) having been migrated to it.

So here's a bit of an introduction to Git from a Subversion (and CVS) user's point of view. The post won't be particularly detailed or comprehensive, as there is plenty of documentation on the web, but should hopefully provide some insight into what looks to be a very promising tool which takes an interesting approach to version control.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 3: Subversion Properties

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the basics of command-line Subversion, and Part 2 covered importing, branching and merging. In this third part I'd like to introduce a useful and very powerful Subversion feature, which isn't always terribly well understood by developers: that of Subversion Properties.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 2: Importing, Branching and Merging

In Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 1: The Basics, I covered many of the more common svn commands, and hopefully illustrated a typical SVN workflow.

This time around I'd like to tackle some of the commands involved in managing a project within a Subversion repository, specifically those that you'll need in order to import a project to a repository, and to branch and merge a project's codebase.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 1: The Basics

I'm constantly surprised by how many experienced developers are completely unfamiliar with using version control - such as Subversion or CVS - from the command line, instead preferring to rely on graphical clients such as TortoiseSVN.

Don't get me wrong - Tortoise has its uses - but I strongly recommend that any professional developer familiarise themselves with command-line version control. It's simpler, quicker and a thousand times more powerful.

In this post I'd like to help those developers out by covering the basics of command-line Subversion usage, via the svn command. I've optimistically named the post "Part 1" in the hope that I'll manage a follow-up post one day, covering more advanced issues such as merging and resolving conflicts. For now though, let's have a look at the basics.