Salvatore Iovene’s 5 SVN Best Practices

I happen to often wonder how others use software development tools, how they gain velocity and collaborate better together.

In the attempt to better my knowledge of SVN, I was looking up what best practices were preached by the community. Needless to say SVN and version control system being quite popular theses days*, Bing Google had a great first hit for me. Of course it’s not the search engine that guide my choice of what’s good or not but the actual content of Salvatore’s post.

This is definitely a must read if you are using any code version control system. For my part if I had 5 commandments for a SVN usage bible, these would be it.

Salvatore 5 best practices:

1. Don’t use versioning like it were a backup tool.
   Yeah, it’s not a ftp or a mp3 archiving system.
2. Commit as soon as your changes makes a logical unit.
   And your code changes should make sense often.
3. Be precise and exhaustive in your commit comments.
   Don’t write a whole novel, just the the index.
4. Never ever break the trunk.
   For those who thought the trunk was meant for future development, it’s not.
5. Branch only if needed.
   This means that you should not branch for every bug you find.

Enjoy!