Files don't appear in windows explorer

[ASTDan]

I am a newbie to the subversion and have a very stupid question.

I have created a repository, and have had good luck with checking stuff out and checking stuff in.

However in my reposiory I don't see the files/folders I have added beyond what subversion needs using windows explorer. I can only see the files I have added in the repository using the repo-browser.

Is this the desired functonality? Are my files actualy in there or is the repository a log of working copy file paths or a bunch of pointers to working copies?

What I have read is that my files are in there but why don't they appear in windows explorer?

Thanks

Dan

[Minh Pham]

QUOTE (ASTDan @ Nov 3 2008, 01:04 PM)

I am a newbie to the subversion and have a very stupid question.

I have created a repository, and have had good luck with checking stuff out and checking stuff in.

However in my reposiory I don't see the files/folders I have added beyond what subversion needs using windows explorer. I can only see the files I have added in the repository using the repo-browser.

Is this the desired functonality? Are my files actualy in there or is the repository a log of working copy file paths or a bunch of pointers to working copies?

What I have read is that my files are in there but why don't they appear in windows explorer?

Thanks

Dan

I think Tortoise SVN is designed to be in this way. YOu only can see your files/folder structure through repo-browser i guess using the correct

URL eg. file:///d:/testSVN/test1/LV85 or http://svn/labview/test1/lv85 format

However if you use your window explorer, and goto your repository, you will find a folder name 'db' (i guess database). This folder probably

contains all revisions info of all your projects that connected to this repository. You will probably find the folder 'revs' in this 'db' folder.

Now inside this 'revs' folder, you can see there is a folder named '0'. All of your files/folders and their associated info should be in here i guess. You can check it by adding file(s) to the repo and see it comes up in this folder in the form of id number (0, 1, 2 ,3....), it increases the number by one everytime you add a file. YOu can also check the file size as well to verify this.

I think this is the way that Tortoise SVN creates its own copy of the file in the repo using its own format. The file that SVN created has all the required info like author, time, rev number, clients, etc... and the data. I think this data is added to the top of the original data so that SVN willl be able to do compare, checkin, checkout, revert .... operations.

It can be something else complicated, but this is my guess.

Hope there will be an expert jump in to clear out some confussions.

[Yair]

In order to be efficient, SVN only stores the changes made between different revisions and not the entire file. As mentioned, this requires it to have its own format, and it packs all changes in a revision into a single file (which can be seen in the revs folder).

Note that this is independent of the SVN client (i.e. it doesn't matter if you use TortoiseSVN, the command line client or any other client). In fact, you probably don't even want to go near the repository itself at all. Any interactions you have with the repository (including copying it) should be done through SVN or you risk corrupting the repository. The "svnadmin" command should allow you to do basically whatever you want, but you will need to read up on it. SVN has an online help book which is pretty detailed and you might want to give at least parts of it a reading.