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Obtaining Topographica using Subversion

Subversion (SVN) is the version control system used for managing Topographica development. SVN keeps track of every change made to any file, and can reconstruct the state of the software from any date and time in the history of Topographica development since January 2004 (see the ChangeLog.txt file for info on each revision). The Topographica SVN repository is hosted by SourceForge.net.

The essentials for using SVN at SourceForge are described below; see the SourceForge SVN documentation for more details or if you have any difficulties. You will need to run at least SVN 1.4 on your machine; SVN clients 1.3 and below will complain that they are too old to communicate with our repository.

Many platforms (e.g. most Linux and other UNIX platforms) already have all of the necessary programs and libraries required to obtain Topographica by SVN. If your machine does not have svn installed, you will first need to install it.

Downloading

Once you have SVN installed, the location (URL) of the Topographica repository to use is https://topographica.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/topographica. In commands given on this page, $TOPOROOT is used to represent that URL, so please replace it in commands you enter. E.g., for bash-like shells, you can begin by typing the following command to make $TOPOROOT be substituted properly: 

export TOPOROOT=https://topographica.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/topographica

The Topographica files can then be checked out by using the command: 

svn co $TOPOROOT/trunk/topographica topographica

This will create a topographica directory in your present working directory.

The checkout process will likely take several minutes (probably appearing to hang at certain points), as some large files are involved. Once it has completed, you can return to the developer installation instructions to go through the build process.

Updating and selecting versions

Users who have Topographica checked out via SVN can update their copy of Topographica by changing to the directory containing the Topographica files and then doing svn update. Note that updating the external/ subdirectory sometimes takes a long time, if some of the external packages have been upgraded.

Following the update, repeat the "make" command you originally used when installing Topographica (the command depends on how you installed Topographica; return to the developer installation instructions for details).

If you wish, you can switch your copy of Topographica to a different version of the code. For instance, to update to a particular revision from the past (e.g. one known to work, if the current revision is broken for some reason), just add -r revno to the update command. E.g., to update to revision r7472 (which ChangeLog.txt shows is the SVN revision number of release 0.9.4), you can do svn update -r 7472.

There are also various alternative copies of the code for special purposes, stored in the tags/ and branches/ sections of the SVN repository. Currently available tags and branches are listed on the tags and branches pages, or you can run e.g. svn ls --verbose $TOPOROOT/tags/.

Hosted by: SourceForge Logo James A. Bednar (jbednar@inf.ed.ac.uk) Last update: Tue Nov 1 9:50:29 UTC 2011.