Beginner Question

Hello, I've inherited a program that uses subversion and I have never used it before. Everything, to my eye, is a mess - one of those house of card type of situations where if you move or delete one file, everything comes crashing down. The end-users update files and never check stuff in.   So we're starting a new topic and the first thing I want to do is capture newly generated data and segregate it from earlier topics. My first thought is "delete nothing, delete nothing, delete nothing". I've created a new branch for this topic and some dummy initialization files - now I have to update some of those dummy initialization files. Just so I don't break anything, my thought was to create an "upload" folder, create working copies of the dummy files from svn, overwrite them with updated user files, and commit them back to svn. A clunky two step process, but given my situation, kinda the safest - I just do not want to touch the users working area at all.  So this actually worked a week ago, and for the life of me, isn't working now :/ The temp "upload" folder I created now says "files out of date" when I try to commit the changes. Ok, so I deleted it and made another upload folder (this is via Windows Explorer). Now when I try to create working copies to that upload folder, it says "Path ... is not a directory". All users, including me, use the same common/shared account (yeah...). My environment is Tortoise SVN on windows 7. Any help appreciated.  In the long run, I would like to have the files in the user working area point to the correct branch, and this workaround folder concept can be chucked. For example, current files are working copies of topic 4, but we're currently on topic 6 (5 never got CM'd :O) How would I get subversion to "point" to my new topic 6 branch?

Last updated 5 years ago

What version of SVN is on your server? On your client(s)?

Tortoise 1.8.5 build 25224, Subversion 1.8.8 -release  So I was able to retrace, or rebuild, my steps to an extent. Rather than "make a working copy", I could "check out", overwrite, commit, and goodness. The part I don't like about this is the pop-up when checking out, to the effective of: "this folder isn't empty", to which I think to myself "so what?" to find that anything in my temp folder gets obliterated by the checkout. Which isn't a terrible showstopper, but I was hoping I could get the "working copy" approach to work since it appears to be less destructive. Again, I'm new to this software, forgive my ignorance.

Instead of "check out" (which is creating a new working copy) in you process, use the Windows Explorer to navigate to that directory and then see if TortoiseSVN's Explorer plugin won't give you an "update" operation...

Thank you!