Introduction

The way we have setup and are using the Subversion SCCS is based on the way FreeBSD does release engineering and the recommendations in the Pragmatic Programming books. Active development is done on the "trunk" while releases and bug fixes live on separate branches. You normally commit changes to the trunk or bug fix branches, and almost never to a release branch. Commits to a release branch are made by creating a bug fix branch and then merging the bug fix branch to the release branch.

Subversion allows you to structure your repository in any way you see fit, allowing for some complex setups, but also making it difficult to create new top-level projects and do checkouts. In order to make this easier, we use a wrapper around the svn command called sc.

Using the sc Tool

Checking Out a Project

If you want to check out the trunk of a project:

sc trunk audipad

If you want to check out the latest release branch:

sc rel audipad

Fixing a Bug on the Latest Release Branch

Let's assume that there is a bug in the latest version of audipad. It has been given bug ID 121. Here is how you use sc to help you fix that bug:

1. Create a new bug fix branch for the changes:

   sc bug audipad 121

2. You now have a new directory representing the bug fix branch, fix the bug, test and commit your changes
3. Close the bug, merging your changes to the release branch and to the trunk:

   sc close audipad 121