As mentioned before, I’ve been using SVK to manage the changes that I’ve been making to Typo.

One of the items on my SVK to-do list was to figure out how to mirror a local SVK repository onto a public Subversion server. This is useful for a number of reasons:

• It provides a backup if the local SVK tree is lost.
• It allows me to use SVK on my laptop and work against the same SVK tree that I’m managing on my server.
• It allows others to see what I have in my SVK tree.

The SVK documentation doesn’t provide an exact recipe for doing this, but it turns out to be pretty simple. First, make sure that you have a publicly-accessible Subversion server where you have write privileges. Follow the Subversion Book if you need help with this.

Next, tell SVK to mirror a chunk of the Subversion share into your local SVK depot:

$ svk mkdir //mirror
$ svk ls http://svn.scottstuff.net/public/
<follow the prompts and have it mirror it onto //mirror/public>
$ svk sync --all
$ svk mkdir //mirror/public/typo
$ svk smerge --baseless //typo/ //mirror/public/typo -m 'Initial publication'

The final mkdir operation should prompt you for your Subversion username and password; once this is done, you should have write access to the Subversion share for all future operations.

One thing that I probably should have done was use the -Il option to smerge instead of -m. With -Il, SVK commits each local change to the remote server individually, using the local commit message. Without it, all changes get bundled up in one big change, and this isn’t really ideal.

At this point the public Subversion server should have a complete copy of your local Typo tree. To keep it up to date, you’ll need to run something like svk smerge -Il //typo/ //mirror/public/typo from time to time.