Subversion on Mac

2005-09-23 OSX

I have just installed Subversion on my Apple Mac Powerbook laptop.

I needed a system that would allow me to work on files on the road, and at home on my PC and transferring between the two was becoming a pain in the neck so installing Subversion on the Mac helps with a central storage place, a way of backing up all my media and also of course a versioning system so no more hundreds of files all over the place.

In fact it got me thinking, why don’t computers come with a versioning system to begin with? It would help in all sorts of situations, people working on files losing data through their own changes, no more hundreds of files all over the place, just branched files, a central store – it goes on and on.

I am going to investigate further the use in a Production/Recording studio as one of the biggest bugbears at the moment for most users is where to store all the project files, audio files and their associated versions and then of course on how to back them up. Although I don’t like Subversions choice of database (in the future it will support more, hopefully including Postgres) its about the only negative thing I can say about it.

For information on how to install Subversion on OSX see the tutorials at:

[][1]http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/08/10/subversion.html

[][3]http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/08/10/subversion.html

And get all the precompiled binaries from:

Wilfredo S�nchez But what isn’t mentioned in the tutorial above or in the Readme on the iDisk is the fact that Berkeley DB wasn’t their, so I downloaded it from [][5]http://www.sleepycat.com/ and compiled it myself.

For a client on Mac I used synX which isn’t bad, not quite as good as tortoiseSVN for the PC but usable nonetheless.