Experience with local version control of SVN working copy?

Question

At my place of work, we use SVN and TortoiseSVN (Windows XP) as a client. I have a longish commute and work offline during that.
Now, I'd like to have some sort of "extended undo" locally; i.e. I would like to have local version control of my SVN working copy, in order to dare to refactor for example.
Switching altogether to e.g. git, mercurial etc. is not an option as the company uses SVN.

What I'd like to know is if someone has any experience in versioning the local SVN working copy, perhaps by running a local git or similar?
Are there any potential drawbacks? (perhaps messing with .svn folders or similar)

Answer 1

I use Git as a local Subversion client for work and it works great. When you do a git svn clone of a Subversion repository, the checkout you get does not have the hidden .svn directories, but instead is a complete Git repository in its own right. The ability to use local, lightweight branches to organise my own development is a killer feature for me.

Other features I use all the time are git stash, staged commits, and git add -p.

Answer 2

Last time I checked the status of SVN, local checkin support was still a long-term feature plan. Git, on the other hand, is definitely an option, with git-svn. That is, if your architecture is Unix, AFAIK, git-svn is not supported yet on the Windows platform.

Answer 3

You can create a snapshot of the work using svn export and then creating your own subversion repository and use the snapshot from the work repository as the initial checkin.

Then you can make your changes and use subversion (your local repository copy) until your done. Of course you may do some regular merging from the main work repository to make sure your content is up to date. Lastly, when your refectoring is done simply do an svn export snapshot of your local repository and merge it back into your main work repository.

This is a bit crude but this is the only way to manage this type of work flow.

If you have regular enough access to work. You can create a branch of the content and work on the branch from the work repository exclusively and use the the local repository method when you need your extended undo functionality. At this point of course using a local version control system won't limit you to subversion so take your pick.

Answer 4

Nothing prevents from running local SVN server. I'm using it that way.

Answer 5

Git would be a good solution (because you can make and merge many branches very easily) but:

• when re-importing your modification to svn, you should cleanup first the many intermediate branches you created under git;
• git-svn does not work with the Windows distribution of Git, so you may want to use a Linux virtual image if you are working on Windows
• If you can make git-svn running, use git2svn et svn2git ruby scripts, as described in this question

Answer 6

I usually do like this:

1. Get SVN repository as working copy.
2. Initialize Git repository in this working copy.
3. Hack hack hack;
4. Commit to my Git repo.
5. Update from company SVN.
6. Resolve conflicts.
7. Commit to company SVN repo a complete feature.

Answer 7

You may want to try SVK which a decentralized VCS based on subversion. It can be used to mirror the official repository on your laptop and the synchronize your commits with the official trunk.