This preliminary documentation describes a system that is not yet in place.

lemur.ling.washington.edu

Lemur hosts a Subversion repository. Subversion is a version control system; it lets you track changes to files, pull up old revisions, and collaborate with other users. For a full description of what Subversion does and how to use it, I recommend reading the free online book Version Control with Subversion. Those of you with previous experience with CVS will be particularly interested in Appendix B, Subversion for CVS Users.

lemur policies:

Accounts are offered to instructors and students in the Department of Linguistics. To request an account, email linghelp@u with your UW netid and a password. This password will be stored in the clear both on the server and on machines on which you run the client, so don't use a password that you use for anything else.

When you request an account you will be automatically added to the lemur-announce mailing list. This is a low-traffic list used only for distributing information of interest to lemur users, such as scheduled downtime.

Your personal directory:

You will be granted a personal directory under /instructors or /students. It's up to you to create whatever structure makes sense to you underneath this directory. A typical initial import of a project might look like this:

svn import my-project svn://lemur.ling.washington.edu/students/mynetid/my-project/trunk

(See Chapter 2 of Version Control with Subversion for more information on how to use svn import, and some suggestions on how to lay out your projects.)

Do not commit confidential information to your repository. While Subversion attempts to keep other users from reading it, passwords are stored in cleartext and cached by the client so the security level is not high.

Shared directory:

/shared is accessible to everyone and is intended for collaboration between users.

Guidelines for the shared directory:

• Create a subdirectory for your project that doesn't conflict with existing names. (svn list svn://lemur.ling.washington.edu/shared will tell you what's there.)

• Add information about your project to the Shared Projects wiki page.

• Be courteous to other users. You should contact the owner of a project before committing changes to it. If someone else commits unwanted changes to your project, though, don't fret -- just use svn merge to undo the changes.

• If a project isn't listed in the Wiki and you need to know who owns it, use the svn log command to find out who created its directory. For example: svn log svn://lemur.ling.washington.edu/shared/mysteryproject

The test directory:

/test is accessible to everyone and is intended as a "sandbox" area for people learning to use Subversion. Please don't commit anything large into /test, and don't commit anything you want to keep -- it's subject to occasional cleaning.

-- DavidBrodbeck - 14 May 2007