Working with SVK in a multi-user environmentEdit

Created , updated

When I first started working with SVK I was working alone and from a single machine. My work cycle was basically:

# make changes
svk ci -m "Commit message"

# make more changes
svk ci -m "Commit message"

When working with multiple branches my pattern was:

# make changes
svk ci -m "Commit message"

# push changes from branch back to trunk
svk push --verbatim

# or, pulling changes from trunk into branch
svk pull

# now working in another branch; get most recent changes
svk up

# make changes
svk ci -m "Commit message"

When I started doing development work in Leopard itself and finally got SVK working (my initial attempts at installing SVK failed and so I fell back to working with vanilla Subversion) I no longer had a single-machine set-up; I now had two depots (two mirrors).

I was surprised to see that after working on another branch my commits were failing even though I had done an svk up beforehand:

Commit into mirrored path: merging back directly.
A checksum mismatch occurred: Base checksum mismatch on '/trunk/NSException+WOTest.m':
   expected:  ab5055a21d72459b6fe6c8bd4c959e20
     actual:  7d57db2ecf5e25fc15762d8bb1feb6cb

This is because in any multi-user (multi-depot) environment svk up is not enough to ensure that your depot reflects the latest changes in the remote repository. Instead you must perform an svk sync (see svk help sync for information about options) to bring the local depot up to date, or pass the -s switch to svk up to achieve the same effect:

# alternative 1:
svk sync //mirrors/mirrored_repo_name
svk up

# alternative 2:
svk up -s

When you’re working from a single machine (single depot) and nobody else is updating the repository from anywhere else you don’t run into this problem, even when working on many branches and using svk push and svk pull extensively. This is because every time you do an svk ci the local depot is updated to reflect those changes and they are then transmitted to the repository; in this way the remote repository never sees any changes which the local depot doesn’t see.

As soon as you switch to a multi-user (multi-depot) pattern then you’ll need to start using svk sync.