Tips for using SVN with Flash

Anyone here using SVN to manage source files for projects? We're just getting our server up and running, and are trying to get a workflow together. We have a guy in India who will be tapping into projects this way.

1.) What about locking? I know SVN doesn't explicitly support it. What can we do to emulate it?

2.) Local copies: we can have several projects that drag on over the course of time. Hundreds of megs of files. Would it be bad to have the local working copy reside on a network drive? How would that impact multiple users attempting to both access that local working copy?

3.) Anyway to integrate it directly with Flash? Instead of checking out a whole project, can the repo just be one big collection of folders, representing a project under each, that I can check out piecemeal as I need them?

4.) Where to store the latest compiled copy? These are all client projects, should we commit only source to the repository, or published as well?

This is all for e-learning projects, so anyone with experience dealing with those pains, please, drop me a pm.

Thanks folks.

Are you going to actually be deploying your site from SVN? As in, just doing an svn co directly on the server? If so, I set up something like:

Code:

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/branches
/tags
/trunk
    /source
    /deploy
    /assets

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/trunk/source being where all your flas, and as files go.
/trunk/deploy is where the swfs and the rest of the public html/js/css/php files go
/trunk/assets are where design psds, pdfs, or anything else that goes along with the site that you don't want to be public

The biggest problems with svn and Flash is that flas are binary. So it's highly recommended to write as much code as possible in external class files. Because it's impossible to merge changes automatically.

If you have any other questions, since it's kinda hard to explain in just a general sense, send me an email or a PM, and I can assist. I use svn daily for any of our web projects. :)

Also checkout TortoiseSVN.

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1.) What about locking? I know SVN doesn't explicitly support it. What can we do to emulate it?

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Subversion has supported locking since v1.2.

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2.) Local copies: we can have several projects that drag on over the course of time. Hundreds of megs of files. Would it be bad to have the local working copy reside on a network drive? How would that impact multiple users attempting to both access that local working copy?

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I don’t understand. Are you saying you want a working copy on a network share? That can be done (and theoretically automated, although Subversion doesn’t support this itself) using svn export to create an unversioned copy of the HEAD revision on the network share. However I don’t think that’s what you mean; are you saying you want the repository on the network share? That’s a bad idea. Firstly, repository revisions are only flat file databases, not actual file trees, making it useless for what you want. Secondly, the subversion user guide explicitly advises against it, especially with a Berkeley-db driven repositories. :)

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3.) Anyway to integrate it directly with Flash? Instead of checking out a whole project, can the repo just be one big collection of folders, representing a project under each, that I can check out piecemeal as I need them?

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Not sure. I know Eclipse has pretty good Subversion support, so I’m guessing Flex might have some version control features, somewhere. As suggested, TortoiseSVN will help you here, so you can avoid the command line completly 95% of the time.

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4.) Where to store the latest compiled copy? These are all client projects, should we commit only source to the repository, or published as well?

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Really depends on your setup; how big the projects are, how often they need to be built, size of the dev team, wow the build even works (is it fully automated?) etc. I have worked fairly big projects (1 million LOC plus) and they all had dedicated build servers, which imported the repository and built the project on a nightly basis. This is probably overkill for your needs (might not even be possible, depending how you're developing), but the general advice is that the builds should not become part of the repository at any stage. You could, I guess, have a dedicated subversion project just for the build, but I've never seen this, and would question the motivation.

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