jeff.dallien.net

A question on Stack Overflow got me thinking that I would like to branch more often while using subversion but two things were preventing me:

• I wasn’t sure how to branch a working copy
• I never took the time to really learn about ‘svn switch’ so branching has always involved a time consuming checkout

So I decided to overcome these two obstacles and since I want to automate things, I decided to spend some time to write scripts to do the work for me. This way when I need to, I can branch and return to trunk with little effort.

I ended up with two scripts which I’ve put on GitHub, svn_wc2b (working copy to branch) and svn_b2wc (branch to working copy). They parse the svn info output to try to find the information needed without requiring me to type it every time.

If I want to branch a working copy I have of trunk, the svn_wc2b script will create a branch for my working copy and svn switch to it. There I can commit my work as needed until its complete. When work is done in the branch, the svn_b2wc script will svn switch back to trunk, merge the branch changes and delete the temporary working copy branch.

The main deficiency the scripts have right now is that they assume the working copy is in trunk and so branching from a branch is not yet supported. I will fix that when I get to a point where I need to do that. I’m hoping to incorporate more temporary branching into my normal processes at work when code isn’t quite ready for trunk, and to share in-progress code with other developers.

• My svn_scripts repository on GitHub