Removing SVN
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 14.12.09It’s one of the greatest banes of my existence; SVN should never, ever be used for graphics. I can spend hours trying to get projects committed, and days waiting for them to upload… only to eventually fail, and I have to start over.
So yeah, I really hate SVN. It shouldn’t even be considered in the list of graphic and media file versioning systems to choose from; yet I’m forced to use it every week at work. A constant, painful reminder that I don’t work at a design house, but a development company. Often SVN screws up so badly I have to rebuild the entire directory structure to clean it up. However, the root issue is obviously SVN itself; simply removing the hidden control files can set things right side up again rather quickly (the hidden folders also contain a duplicate of every single visible file, turning a 52Gb motion graphics project into an unwieldy 104Gb). Once the offending SVN directories are removed, I can finally freely move folders of assets from one project (previously subjected to versioning) to a fresh new project, or a project versioned under a different directory, without sending SVN into day-long seizures. Very helpful!
Mezzocode.com has kindly posted an Automator workflow for removing SVN files, and I’ve taken the liberty of updating it for OSX Snow Leopard as a dedicated Finder service (Jason Eisen has also posted SVN and hidden file removal workflows, if you’re interested). Hope it helps someone else as much as it has helped me!
To install, copy the file to your ~/library/Services/ directory. Right-click on a folder in Finder, and “Remove SVN” should show up in the list of services. There may be a short pause as Finder opens the Automator workflow, but once started it’ll ask for confirmation before deleting any SVN files, then post a Growl notice on completion.
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