Re: Subversion for backups?

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Kyle Sexton <ks@mocker.org> writes:

> At Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:49:41 +0200,
> Rainer Stengele <rainer.stengele@online.de> wrote:
>> 
>> I use subversion to backup and track my org files.
>> I have a server in my office running the subversion server.
>> 
>> Access is by port forwarding the subversion port via ssh - no matter 
>> being under windows (putty) or under Linux (ssh).
>> In this way I have my subversion server and repository virtually 
>> "local", that is acces is always via
>> 
>> svn://localhost/repository
>> 
>> 
>> I also track all my .emacs.d specific files, especially the org-mode 
>> files themselves as well as icicles and all kinds of libraries etc.
>> This makes it easy to update my whole emacs installation on any of my 3 
>> desktops and 3 notebooks.
>> 
>
> Interesting, can you describe your workflow a bit?  
>
>   1. Do you commit a change to subversion every time you update an org
>   file, or are commits scheduled through a cronjob?
>
>   2. When you open new files, do you always check them out of the
>   repository / work / check them back in?  Or do you work on a local
>   directory structure and sync outside of emacs?
>
>   3. Can you post some of the relevant config lines you have, and the
>   key sequences you use for commits?  (This may be asking too much. :))
>
> Thanks in advance, I've seen several ways to do this and I'm trying to
> weigh the merits of each approach.

A while ago, I used to keep everything in subversion. If I remember
correctly, I made heavy use of the svn commands ("svn mv", "svn cp",
"svn add", etc.) and used psvn.el to manage my repository within emacs.

I wasn't really worried about keeping detailed log messages so I used a
basic alias:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
alias commit='svn commit ~/mystuff -m "Sync"'
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I just made sure to invoke this regularly.

This is a bit off-topic, but I found the separation of repository and
working files in SVN a bit cumbersome after a while. You can't view your
history when you aren't connected to the remote repository, your history
is in only one place, you have duplicate files in the .svn directories,
etc.

For this reason I highly recommend a distributed version control system
such as git, bzr, etc.. You can start locally quite easily ("git init",
"git add .", "git commit -a") and then decide to create a remote
repository whenever you'd like.

In fact, there's a nice tutorial on this:

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-vcs.php

Best,
Matt