SVN Working copies of network resources

Question

Ok, I get my version control processes for my web team.

I know that each user will have a full working copy of his code on his local machine.

Unfortunately, for many of our web applications, they have additional server DBs or other system integration requirements that cannot be replicated to a user workstation (i.e. some servers simply do not install on XP, Vista, etc.). d.)

I am looking for setting up an area on one of my servers that acts as a working copy for each user, but is still online.

i.e.

/SVRROOT/ - Dev1 Working Copy - Dev2 Working Copy - Dev3 Working Copy 

This means that each user will have their own workspace (according to SVN best practices), but they will be online.

Does anyone see a problem with this model?

Answer 1

You may find that the performance of Subversion operations over the network is much slower than the performance of the same Subversion operation locally. I ran into this problem on Unix land with working directories installed on top of NFS, but I suspect you might run into the same situation using shared Windows resources.

It would be useful to compare performance in different situations to see what impact it will have.

Answer 2

Some disruptive operations will be slightly better if you map the network folder to the drive letter. The apache Apr library does some extra network requests when you use the unc path rather than the drive letter.

As a rule of thumb, you should simply use the local folder for your working copy, as the idea is that you might just need to back up the server.

Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 allow most web server scripts with its mini-server, and most databases can be accessed over the network (or configured for each developer). This separates developers from one point of failure.

With each on one server, one developer can crash the web server / database server that all developers use ...