First Post!

SVN MEN

I really need some help trying to figure out WTF with SVN. Everybody here and elsewhere regards it so highly, and I think for a normal software dev it'd be perfect, but I'm not entirely sure we can use it at work.

I really need to know if SVN will work for us, because right now I'm not so sure that it will do the things we need. And if it does, then how? I can't figure it out.


Our current development situation is this:
We do web site development, mostly in PHP. We're based in Edmond, OK but our servers are at The Planet in Dallas. Local servers are Windows based due to Exchange and Sharepoint and other crap not directly related to our programming. The servers in Dallas are all on Linux. Currently our dev server is the same physical box as our live server, but we're looking towards fixing this obvious problem (and moving the dev box to one that is local instead of in Dallas), but there's no gurantees we'll be allowed to do that.

Currently we use Dreamweaver's checkin/checkout file locking as our only manner of source control. We have all the source on a network drive here for local editing, and then upload the file to the servers in Dallas. This is a lot quicker than it sounds because Dreamweaver has a shortcut which uploads the file to the remote FTP. But dreamweaver is crap and we want to move away from it and towards an actual source control solution (and we all want to use Rapid PHP or gVim).


Can SVN be set up so that the working copy isn't on each developer's local machine, but is instead just on a network drive somewhere, and then we could set up Apache to read from that working copy? But this wouldn't really help in a situation where you have multiple developers all working on that same codebase, would it? Running apache on each developer's workstation w/ a seperate copy of apache isn't an option for us.


Also, what's with Trunks/Branches/the other thing? I understand the tree metaphor, it's just the actual implementation of it that I don't get. Do you keep stuff forked forever or do they eventually merge back in?

We frequently face situations where one feature is done and needs to go into the next push to the live servers, but another isn't. Is this the sort of situation that branching could be great for? Maybe have a branch for each area of change and only merge the finished one back in, and then that new trunk revision is the one that gets pushed to the live server?



Sorry for the long paragraphs and if any of this doesn't make much sense; I'm on my lunch break right now and am trying to type fast so I still have some time left to eat.


TLDR: SVN!? Helps :O