I7 and svn?

capmikee · August 18, 2010, 9:09pm

I just tried to add my I7 projects directory to my personal svn repository. It looked like everything went okay, but now I’m having a weird problem:

$ svn ci
svn: Working copy '/Users/mike/eyeballsun/i' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)

$ svn cleanup
svn: 'headache.inform/Build' is not a working copy directory

What it looks like is that instead of just updating files within the Build and Source directory of a project, the IDE is completely replacing those directories, including the .svn subdirectories that Subversion uses to keep track of them. This could be a really nasty situation.

Has anyone actually managed to keep their I7 work in Subversion? Got any tricks for me?

Thanks.

Juhana · August 18, 2010, 9:13pm

Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening. What I’m doing right now is that I run a script that copies the relevant files to another folder before submitting that folder to SVN. It’s one extra step but on the other hand at the same time I have the script to do other stuff like copy the relevant extensions to the same folder to be stored in the repository with the source code.

Ron_Newcomb · August 18, 2010, 9:56pm

Yes, it’s a known headache, specific to Mac. I do copy-fu but should probably automate it like Juhana.

It seems svn does not respect the Mac’s “bundle” type as being opaque, instead treating it like any ol’ folder.

vaporware · August 19, 2010, 4:33am

You may want to consider using a VCS that keeps all of its metadata in a single top-level folder, like Mercurial or Git.

capmikee · August 19, 2010, 4:39am

Ugh! What a drag. Thanks for the suggestions - I’ll probably do something like Juhana’s solution.

capmikee · August 19, 2010, 2:11pm

I’m wondering - The svn repository has hooks so you can do various things on the server before and after committing. But does the svn client have any hooks so you can do anything with the working directory before committing or checking out (like copying your Inform files into your working directory?)

George · August 19, 2010, 2:49pm

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote this in RAIF some time back:

Version control is key here, as others have said. But be careful
using Inform and Subversion!

On the mac in particular, each time Inform “saves”, it completely
destroys and re-creates your project.inform/ folder. This means all
the .svn/ folders are destroyed as well. The same goes for .git/
or .hg/ if you’re using a distributed version control system.

The solution that Jack and I came up with for collaboration:

Put a directory under version control (in our case, we were using
mercurial, so it had an .hg/ directory at the top.)

Use inform to create mystory.inform/

Put mystory.inform/Source/story.ni explicitly under version
control as well, but nothing else.

Then, when you get a collaborator:

Have them checkout a working copy (or clone) of the project.

Move mystory.inform/ to somewhere outside the sandbox.

Use inform to create a new mystory.inform/ within the sandbox
again.

Copy the original mystory.inform/Source/story.ni back on top of
the story.ni within the sandbox.

Now you’re set to go. Modify the story within the Inform IDE, then
‘commit’ your changes to the server. Likewise, ‘updating’ will modify
the story file.

THE BIG CAVEAT: be sure to update ONLY when the Inform IDE is NOT
running. Else it will clobber your newly-updated file and you’ll lose
your collaborator’s changes.

There’s also some information in the Rover’s Day Out README (on the Google project page: code.google.com/p/rovers-day-out/)