Release management in SVN

Richard Ev picture Richard Ev · Feb 20, 2009 · Viewed 16.7k times · Source

When I look in the SVN log I really wish I could see markers that tell me when releases were done. I've seen this in other version control systems such as PVCS and Perforce.

Can this be done in SVN? I've done a little bit of research and so far it looks like this sort of thing is not supported.

Edit

We don't want to have to copy our source to a different folder for each release. This results in a huge amount of unnecessary duplication of files on the developers machine and only gives us a record of the revision number of each release. I can do that using a text document!

Edit2

My goal is to have a single view that shows me a chronology of my releases, between which I can see all of the code changes that took place between each release. This then makes it easier to compile release notes.

Answer

Adam Bellaire picture Adam Bellaire · Feb 20, 2009

Not as such. The accepted way to do releases in SVN is to have a "tags" directory where your release source is copied for each particular release. For example /tags/release-0.11 ... There isn't anything preventing you from messing with the tags directory by accident, out of the box, but some people like to set up pre-commit hooks to prevent accidental commits to release tags.

Here's a decent article describing a release process in SVN.