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Introduction
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This is the second of a projected series of guides aimed at giving beginning users of Ubuntu a gentle introduction into some of the more fundamental tools available in Linux. This particular guide deals with 'svn', a great commandline tool for controlling, manipulating and accessing software held in subversion repositories. I will not however be dealing with setting up an svn repository or committing changes to such a repository in this introductory guide but simply with accessing such a repository as an end-user. Perhaps a future guide will deal with the other side of svn...
Can I emphasis right at the beginning: Using 'svn' is easy!!. This guide, similar to other guides in this series, will walk through a real-world example and will be best followed by duplicating the steps I am demonstrating on your own computer and perhaps experimenting a little on the way. And remember "Have Fun!!".
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The basic use of 'svn'
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FFmpeg usage is very active on the Ubuntu Forums so our 'real-world' example will deal with the FFmpeg subversion repository although it could as easily be the MPlayer or vlc repositories. First we move to the Desktop and download the FFmpeg subversion subdirectory we require and place it in a directory called 'ffmpeg':
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop
$ svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
There you have the source code for the latest svn FFmpeg neatly filed away on your Desktop. Can you see how easy the usage of 'svn' is? This source code contains a large amount of 'versioning' infomation to allow you to upgrade and downgrade your downloaded source code which accounts for the slightly bloated 38 megabyte size of this directory. If you wanted to get a copy without this information you would use 'export' rather than 'checkout' but bear in mind that this cannot subsequently be updated. So what version of FFmpeg have we downloaded? Use the following command to see the local version information:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn info
Path: .
URL: svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk
Repository Root: svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg
Repository UUID: 9553f0bf-9b14-0410-a0b8-cfaf0461ba5b
Revision: 18905
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: bcoudurier
Last Changed Rev: 18905
Last Changed Date: 2009-05-23 11:22:43 +1000 (Sat, 23 May 2009)
And there we can see the revision number, the date and author of the change but we cannot see the nature of this change. For this the following command is required:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn log -r 18905
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r18905 | bcoudurier | 2009-05-23 11:22:43 +1000 (Sat, 23 May 2009) | 3 lines
Set progressive_sequence before MPV_common_init which cares about it when
setting mb_height for interlaced mpeg-2 encoding.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are all the details of the changes made by revision r18905, understanding of these actual changes I leave to you 
. If you are a little curious about the last four changes to the FFmpeg subversion repository you can issue the following command:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn log --limit 4
and the last 4 revision logs will be nicely formatted and presented on your terminal. You can of course substitute any number here but be aware this command can sometimes take a little while to run. The final command that is useful at a basic level of svn usage is probably the most important one, 'svn update' or its shortened form 'svn up':
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn up
U libavformat/gxfenc.c
U libavformat/mxfenc.c
Fetching external item into 'libswscale'
Updated external to revision 29318.
Updated to revision 18906.
You can see that now our copy has been updated to revision 18906 and we are given the details of the various files that have been updated. Can you remember me saying before: Using 'svn' is easy!!
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Moving beyond the basics
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To tell the truth the information given above will be sufficient for 90% of usage of svn but of course there will be times when things go wrong and then we need to dig out a few more commands from our svn arsenal. Perhaps revision 18906 is more than a little disastrous and we need to return to the successful version r18905, the following command will do exactly this:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn up --revision 18905
U libavformat/gxfenc.c
U libavformat/mxfenc.c
Fetching external item into 'libswscale'
Updated external to revision 29318.
Updated to revision 18905.
The shortened form of '--revision', which is simply '-r', can be used if you prefer. So now we have returned safely to our previous working version. But what if there is a power surge, a network outage or a computer malfunction while you are interacting with the subversion repository? This can often leave your local version of the repository locked with an error message such as: 'svn: Working copy 'ffmpeg' locked'. The following command should fix this condition by recursively cleaning up the working copy, removing locks, resuming unfinished operations, etc:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn cleanup .
And you should now be able to use the FFmpeg source again. In a final note to this section I have to unfortunately dispel the illusion that I know such an amazing amount about the svn command line! All of the information that I have mentioned so far is easily seen by accessing svn 'help'. A list of help topics can be seen by issuing the following command:
So to see details of the 'cleanup' command I have just illustrated you would run:
Code:
$ svn help cleanup
cleanup: Recursively clean up the working copy, removing locks, resuming
unfinished operations, etc.
usage: cleanup [PATH...]
Valid options:
--diff3-cmd ARG : use ARG as merge command
Global options:
--username ARG : specify a username ARG
--password ARG : specify a password ARG
--no-auth-cache : do not cache authentication tokens
--non-interactive : do no interactive prompting
--config-dir ARG : read user configuration files from directory ARG
The same syntax will reveal the intimate details of all of the other commands I have mentioned such as 'checkout', 'update' and 'log' as well as revealing many others that I have not even touched upon.
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Advanced usage of 'svn'
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I believe that the preceding sections have comprehensively covered the needs of about 99% of casual svn users but for those who perhaps want a little more there is this final section. Are you a little curious to see the exact code changes between revision 18905 and revision 18906? If so then you can use 'svn diff' as follows:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn diff -r 18905:18906
Index: libavformat/gxfenc.c
===================================================================
--- libavformat/gxfenc.c (revision 18905)
+++ libavformat/gxfenc.c (revision 18906)
@@ -19,7 +19,6 @@
* Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA
*/
-#include "libavutil/fifo.h"
#include "avformat.h"
#include "gxf.h"
#include "riff.h"
Index: libavformat/mxfenc.c
===================================================================
--- libavformat/mxfenc.c (revision 18905)
+++ libavformat/mxfenc.c (revision 18906)
@@ -35,7 +35,6 @@
#include <math.h>
#include <time.h>
-#include "libavutil/fifo.h"
#include "libavutil/random_seed.h"
#include "libavcodec/bytestream.h"
#include "audiointerleave.h"
And there are the changes conveniently laid out as a patch. 'svn diff' has many, many options that can of course be examined closely with 'svn help diff'. One of the most interesting for advanced users is the ability to write your own patches against the svn tree. First run 'svn up' and then make a small change in the FFmpeg source code; for the purpose of this demonstration I have altered one of the ffpreset files. Now run the following:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn diff > ../ffpreset.diff
Now open the file $HOME/Desktop/ffpreset.diff and you will see:
Code:
Index: ffpresets/libx264-lossless_ultrafast.ffpreset
===================================================================
--- ffpresets/libx264-lossless_ultrafast.ffpreset (revision 18907)
+++ ffpresets/libx264-lossless_ultrafast.ffpreset (working copy)
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
subq=0
me_range=16
g=250
+This is a demonstration of 'svn diff'
keyint_min=25
sc_threshold=40
i_qfactor=0.71
And there in living glory is your first patch on the subversion FFmpeg! You could submit this to the FFmpeg developers but you might be better to use yet another svn command to quietly lose this change:
Code:
$ cd $HOME/Desktop/ffmpeg
$ svn revert . -R
Reverted 'ffpresets/libx264-lossless_ultrafast.ffpreset'
That is about all I have to offer on this introductory guide to the use of svn. If you wish to read a little further an excellent starting point would be Version Control with Subversion, a site that I used extensively in the writing of this guide.
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And in conclusion...
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Old hands in the Linux world know that this brief guide illustrates just the bare beginnings of 'svn' usage. In particular it does not deal with the heart and soul of subversion where repositories are created and changes are committed, reverted, commented upon etc by multiple developers. But if this guide has managed to give anybody even the barest and most practical beginning to svn usage my goal has been achieved!
May 23rd, 2009.
Andrew Strong
Adv Reply
Originally Posted by wieman01
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