Haven’t heard much from people about their observations on what is a fairly major upgrade to the SVN shell for Windows.
Anyone who uses Tortoise and is considering the upgrade should check the changelog before proceeding.
The obvious/major changes are covered there including the new metadata format for working copies which requires your project working copies to be upgraded. Also the log dialog, revision graph, branch/tag and commit dialogs have all undergone a lot of interface improvements.
So far I’ve already noticed two other changes not documented in the changelog on tortoisesvn.net, they’re specific to functions that I know I use at least once a day so it’s worth highlighting them.
SVN Export
The ‘SVN Export’ function has always been one of Tortoise SVN’s most overlooked menu items. Export only runs on folders and when run, it copies the selected folder to another folder removing the .svn folders recursively so that you get a completely unversioned copy of the original folder and it’s children.
One of the problems with the function that was always counter-intuitive was that the destination folder could not be created, it was just created under the destination you selected. So exporting ‘Temp’ to C:\Temp would put the unversioned contents in C:\Temp\Temp.
In 1.7, this has been changed. When you export an SVN folder, the destination folder is where the contents of the folder you’re exporting will be placed. So now you have to create a new folder where your export will be copied to.
Hard to see why this wasn’t included in the changelog and something you only find out through trial-and-error, as welcome as the change is.
SVN Cleanup
I’m not sure how many people ever knew what ‘Cleanup’ did. Over the years I’ve seen developers run it on folders trying to fix conflicts, directory not found errors and every other SVN error a repo could return.
In 1.7, running an SVN Cleanup will now give you an options menu that allows you to choose what cleanup options to run. I know I’ve always used cleanup to refresh shell overlays (the SVN icons), but now the new menu shows you some other options. Nice.
