SVN best-practices - working in a team

Question

I'm starting out with SVN. I know the basic commands and understand the base principles. I was wondering if anyone has any tips or best practices for working with Subversion in a team environment.

I can see the benefit of adding reasonably verbose messages when committing code, but are there other things I should bear in mind?

Thanks for all the great answers - they've helped a lot.

Answer 1

Encourage frequent commits. Teammates new to version control may feel like they need to keep the code out of the repository until "it works right". Teach everyone to commit early and often to find issues as soon as possible. Instead of holding code 'till it works, propose that your teammates create branches for feature that might break trunk. That leads to...

Establish a branching and tagging practice. In addition to branches for features, encourage your teammates to use branches for large-bug fixes. Tag major bug fixes at the beginning and end of the work. Maintain tags (and possibly branches) for production/qa releases.

Establish a policy for trunk and stick to it. One example might be, "trunk must always build without errors." or "trunk must always pass all unit tests". Any work that can't yet meet the standards of trunk must be done in a branch.