I was getting ready to make some changes to my regular expression editor, and once again wished for a Subversion repository on my home system.  The last time that I tried to set this up, I failed miserably.  The ugly underside of open source projects is that newbie support can be spotty at best.

I rummaged around quite a bit, and first managed to get the subversion server running from the command line, but once again failed to get it running as a service (my preferred method).  This time, I persisted and began to get some traction.

Issue 1: version.  The 1–Click Installer that’s available online is pretty old (version 1.3 of Subversion).  The docs I found was for version 1.4.  Also, it turns out that version 1.4 of svnserve supports running as a Windows service.  I dumped the 1–Click stuff and dug up the 1.4.5 (the latest) installer for Windows and got it going.  Still no luck.

Issue 2: network drives.  Then, I remembered an issue we ran into at work:  services cannot access mapped drives (and, in fact, have trouble with drives that require user id’s and passwords).  I changed the mapped drive letter of the repository to a UNC path.  Bingo! I actually had a connection.

Issue 3: creating the root project.  I followed the instructions I found to create the root project, and it seemed to work. But, when I tried to browse to it, Tortoise couldn’t find it.  I went back to the instructions. I’d skipped a few steps around security.  I went back and set up security properly. Another Bingo! I now can browse!

So far, everything seems to be working well. I have my SVN repository set up (as a Windows service) and I have TortoiseSVN installed (a requirement for easy SVN use).  Now, I’m ready to get back to work …

9/15/2007 12:08:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  development