Any disadvantages in accessing Subversion repositories through file:// for a solo developer?

Question

If you have Subversion installed on your development machine and you don't work in a team, is there any reason why you should use the svn protocol instead of file?

Answer 1

If you are working by yourself on a single machine, then in my experience using the file:// protocol works fine. Even when my team was using Subversion off a remote server, I would set up a local file-based repository for my own personal projects. If you get to the point where you need to access it from a different machine, then I would go to the trouble of setting up a server-based repository. You might also look at a distributed system like Mercurial - we were evaluating it at my last company just before I left - but definitely pick one or the other, mixing svn and hg doesn't work well at all.

Answer 2

You can always add a subversion server later, have it points to your file:// repository, and you'll get svn:// access immediately.

The protocol doesn't matter, it just allow transport over different kinds of medium, it's the repository content that matters.

And installing SVNSERVE later is rather easy.

However, the flavor of subversion software you use does matter though, for instance one vendor makes it so the metadata is stored in "_svn" instead of ".svn" you might want to check for compatibility first.

Answer 3

I believe as long as the use of the relevant SVN tools is enabled, you should have no problem - like others said, you can always set up a server later on.

My tip then, is to make sure you can use ToroiseSVN and the Collabnet subversion client.

One major tip to ease the setup of an SVN server right now, if you choose to, is to use a Virtual Appliance. That is, a virtual machine that has subversion pre-installed and (mostly) pre-configured on it - pretty much a plug & play thing. You can try here, here and here, or just try searching Google on "subversion virtual appliance".

Answer 4

A while back on a project we were using ant to do builds. Ant would check out the latest code from the SVN repo, do the build, then create a tag in the SVN repo of the code the build was based off of. We found that the Ant automation couldn't work across any protocol except for the svn:// protocol.

So, if you want to use Ant to automate any interaction with SVN, you'll need to use the svn:// protocol.