Vendor Branch Management with Subversion

So, I sometimes hack on FreeBSD and want version control for my local changes. Working with CVS and vendor branches seemed to much of a pain and everyone was talking about how nowadays you'd use Subversion anyways. So I decided to give Subversion a try.

What helped me a lot in getting started with Subversion was the Book "Version Control with Subversion", which is available online.

So I set up a subversion server and import snapshots of the FreeBSD source tree on a more or less regular basis. Here's what I do to update the vendor branch.

• First, I fetch the latest and greatest of the FreeBSD sources, logged into svn.dmz.local.deadc0.de as user svn. I use csup, the CVSup replacement in the base system. I don't use CVS since it would leave the CVS directories all over the place. It would also be slower and I don't need its functionality anyways. This is the supfile I use:

  *default host=cvsup.dmz.local.deadc0.de
  *default base=/var/db
  *default prefix=/usr
  *default release=cvs tag=.
  *default delete use-rel-suffix
  
  *default compress
  
  src-all
  

  The actual command I run is:

  # csup -L 2 -g ~/supfile
  



• Then, I use the Script svn_load_dirs, which can be installed through the devel/svn_load_dirs port. I invoke it as follows:

  $ svn_load_dirs -t tag http://.../repos/freebsd/vendor current /usr/src
  

  This causes the repository location /repos/freebsd/vendor/current to be updated with the contents of /usr/src. After that, a tag is created at /repos/freebsd/vendor/tag, caused by the parameter -t.
  This whole process takes a while, and every once in a while, something needs to be acknowledged. So unfortunately, it can't be let run over night. One thing to remember: The command is run as the currently logged in user "svn", but the repository username is "phs". So when the script asks for the password, I hit enter. Then a blank line appears where I enter the repository user name. After hitting enter, the scripts asks for the password again, this time for the right user.


• The next step is to SSH into knecht.dmz.local.deadc0.de and go to /usr/devel/src. There, I run

  $ svn up

  After that, I merge the new vendor code with:
  
  $ svn merge http://.../repos/vendor/freebsd/ http://.../repos/vendor/current .


• The last step may have produced some conflicts, so I use svn status to detect conflicts.


• After all conflicts have been resolved, I commit the changes with svn ci and voilà, that's it.