Chapter 3
SVN Server

SVN (Subversion) is a popular version control system that keeps track of the complete history of changes for a set of source files. SVN is of great help when several people work on the same project.

You can find the SVN manual at http://svnbook.red-bean.com. Lots of documentation, including tutorials, can easily be found on the net.

The InriaGForge site http://gforge.inria.fr hosts a SVN server for CGAL. The complete documentation to access the CGAL project on InriaGForge is at http://www.cgal.org/Members/svn_cgal/. In a nutshell:

3.1   Structure of the repository

The CGAL repository, which is backed up daily, is organized in the following way:

• There is one folder under /svn/cgal/trunk/ per CGAL package.
• Such a folder has the same structure as the current CGAL packages (Chapter 4).

  As a general rule, try to not put under SVN control any files that are automatically generated. Note that you can put some files under SVN control that you don't want to be included in releases (e.g., literate programming web files). You can do that by adding their names in a dont_submit file (at the top of the module), using the syntax explained in the tar manual (see the -exclude-from option in the doc at http://www.gnu.org/manual/tar/). By default, the files TODO and wrapper.tex are excluded from submissions.

The repository tree has the following structure:

   /svn/cgal
           |
           +---- trunk/
           |         |
           |         +--- Convex_hull_2/
           |         |     |
           |         |     |-- maintainer
           |         |     |
           |         |     |-- changes.txt
           |         |     |
           |         |     |-- TODO
           |         |     |
           |         |     +-- include/CGAL/
           |         |     |
           |         |     +-- src/
           |         |     |
           |         |     +-- doc_tex/
           |         |     |
           |         |     +-- test/
           |         |     |
           |         |     +--  ...
           |         |
           |         +--- Number_types/
           |         |
           |         +--- Cartesian_kernel/
           |         |
           |         +--- ...
           |
           +---- branches/
           |         |
           |         +--- CGAL-1-1-patches/
           |         |
           |         +--- ...
           |
           +---- tags/
                     |
                     +--- CGAL-1-0/
                     |
                     +--- ...

3.2   Access to the repository

Here are the access rules:

• Everybody who has a login and is part of the CGAL project on InriaGForge has read/write access to the CGAL repository via SVN. There is also read-only access for members via the web at https://gforge.inria.fr/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/?root=cgal.
• Each package has a set (which can be only one person) of people having write access to the corresponding folder. It's up to the maintainer of the package to decide who is given write access, and how you should coordinate.
  This rule is not currently enforced by SVN (each CGAL developer has write access to the whole repository from SVN's point of view). CGAL developers must voluntary enforce this rule.
• Currently, there is no anonymous read-only access via SVN. Only the read/write access for members via SVN over SSH is available.

3.3   How to use it

• The first step is to register to InriaGForge at http://gforge.inria.fr.
• Step 2 is to create a pair of public/private SSH 2 keys, and to upload the public one to InriaGForge.
• To be added to CGAL project, send your login name to Sylvain.Pion@sophia.inria.fr or Laurent.Saboret@sophia.inria.fr. Also, indicate for which packages you need write permission.
• If your SSH key contains a passphrase, you have to enter it in ssh-agent. Type:
  ssh-add
  and enter the passphrase corresponding to your key.
• At this point, it's handy to store the repository URL in a shell variable:
  export svncgal=svn+ssh://scm.gforge.inria.fr/svn/cgal
• To get the list of existing modules:
  svn ls $svncgal/trunk
• To check out a module, say Convex_hull_2:
  svn co $svncgal/trunk/Convex_hull_2
• Once you have checked out a module, you don't need to specify the $svncgal URL anymore for the usual commands like svn commit...
• You may check out all packages by:
  svn co $svncgal/trunk

After each commit, an automatic mail is sent to the cgal-commits@lists.gforge.inria.fr mailing-list which records the log message as well as the URLs to the corresponding diffs within the ViewCVS interface. Maintainers and developpers can subscribe to it in order to check what gets commited to their packages.