Collaborative Poetry

  1. CSSE 221 - Fundamentals of Software Development HONORS
  2. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
  3. Computer Science & Software Engineering

Introducing TortoiseSVN by Writing Poetry as a Team

Goal: To get practice checking out repositories, updating and committing work done. Each group will write a short poem, one line at a time. Each student will get the latest version in progress ("update"), add a line, and save the updated version for others to see ("commit").

Instructions:

  1. If you have not installed TortoiseSVN (the Windows client for Subversion), you will not be able to participate at this time. You will have to install it and complete the exercise as homework. Please look on with a classmate during class.
  2. Group into the teams assigned by your instructor and quickly decide upon a poetry style you will use, for example, straight rhyme, limericks, or haiku.
  3. Choose a student to write a line of poetry.
  4. The student must checkout the repository into a working copy into a temporary folder on her laptop. After checkout, the folder should contain a Poetry.txt file.
  5. The student adds a line to the poem, using any text editor.
  6. The student commits her changes to the repository. Make sure to write a brief comment for the log - the first time, a simple message such is "Initial Commit" will do.
  7. After the changes are committed, repeat steps 3 - 6, until everyone in the group has a chance to add a line.
  8. Once everyone has added a line, repeat the process, only now that each student has a working copy, replace step 4 with "Update your local copy".
  9. When everyone has added a second line, each student should update her local copy and ensure she can see everyone's changes.

Resources

Here are some resources that you can refer to while doing this assignment.

To check out a repository:

  1. Create a folder in My Documents to hold your working copy.
  2. From within this folder, right-click and choose "SVN Checkout..."
  3. In the next window, enter as a URL: http://svn.cs.rose-hulman.edu/repos/csse221-200810-teamXX, where XX is the 2-digit number given to your group.
  4. When prompted, enter your username and password given to you. [This password will be used repeatedly this term, so don't lose it.]
  5. It should create the repository. Each folder in the repository will contain a .svn folder and possibly some content.

To update your local copy:

  1. Choose the folder you want to update. Right-click on it and choose "SVN Update"
A dialog box will tell you which files have been changed since you last updated your copy.

To commit changes to the repository:

  1. Choose the folder containing the changes you want to commit. Right-click on it and choose "SVN Commit..."
    • Note: it is quickest to choose the deepest folder containing the changed files. However, if you have made changes to multiple folders, you may select the deepest folder containing both those folders and commit both changes in a single step.
  2. In the dialog box, enter a brief comment about the changes you made. If you ever need to roll back to a previous version (a benefit of version control), this will help you find which copy to use.
  3. If changes were made to more than one file, and you don't want to commit all the files, you may unselect ones as needed.
  4. Click OK.

A dialog box will tell you which files were committed.