SVK::Co...:Branch(3)

💖 SVK::Co...:Branch 💖

okay bestie, gather round — this is the manual page for SVK::Command::Branch, the bit of SVK that lets you manage a project together with all its branches. No cap, it's the branch wrangler. 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

branch --create BRANCH [DEPOTPATH]

branch --list [--all]
branch --create BRANCH [--tag] [--local] [--switch-to] [--from|--from-tag BRANCH|TAG] [DEPOTPATH]
branch --move BRANCH1 BRANCH2
branch --merge BRANCH1 BRANCH2 ... TARGET
branch --checkout BRANCH [PATH] [DEPOTPATH]
branch --delete BRANCH1 BRANCH2 ...
branch --setup DEPOTPATH
branch --push [BRANCH]
branch --pull [BRANCH]
branch --offline [BRANCH]
branch --online [BRANCH]

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -l [--list] — lists out the branches for this project 🦋
• --list-projects — lists the projects that are avaliable 👑
• --create — makes a brand new branch, main character moment ✨
• --tag — creates it over in the tags directory instead 🎀
• --local — targets land in the local branch
• --delete [--rm|del] — deletes the BRANCH(s), bye bestie 💅
• --checkout [--co] — checks out BRANCH right into the current directory
• --switch-to — switches your current checkout over to a different branch (and yes, you can pair it with --create)
• --merge — automatically merges every single change from BRANCH1, BRANCH2, etc, into TARGET
• --project — tells it which target project name you mean
• --push — moves your changes to wherever this branch was originally copied from
• --pull — syncs changes from wherever this branch was originally copied from
• --setup — sets up a project for the DEPOTPATH you specify
• --from BRANCH — names the source branch
• --from-tag TAG — names the source tag
• -C [--check-only] — tries a create, move or merge operation but literally changes nothing (a lil dress rehearsal 🙈)
• -P [--patch] FILE — writes the patch between the branch and where it was copied from out to FILE
• --export — used alongside --checkout to make a detached copy
• --offline — takes the current branch offline, making a copy under //local
• --online — takes the current branch online, pushing changes back to the mirror path, and then switches over to the mirror

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

SVK gives you the tools to manage your project's branching and merging way more easily — as long as you stick to the standard "trunk/, branches/, tags/" directory layout for your project, or you specifically tell SVK where your branches live. You got this fr fr. 🌈

🦋 Usage (without projects)

A very simple sample usage would be checking out the trunk from a project you wanna work on but don't have upstream commit rights for. That way you can keep a local branch and send in patches. 🫶

Say you've alread mirrored this repository to //mirror/Project:

svk co //mirror/Project/trunk

or

svk branch --co trunk //mirror/Project/

and then

svk branch --offline

You're now working in a local branch! Make local commits and changes as much as you need. If you want to bring in changes from your remote repository, you can pull them down:

svk branch --pull

To see what changes you've made, you can create a patch between the local branch and the remote repository:

svk branch -P - --push

If you have commit rights to the remote repository, you can also

svk branch --push

to send your changes. 💌

You can use svk branch's branching capability in this mode, but honestly? It'll be way friendlier if you set up a project. ✨

🌸 Usage (projects)

To initialize a project in a repository, run the setup command:

svk branch --setup //mirror/Project

If you've got the standard trunk branches tags directories, svk will offer them as your starting point. And actually — if you have trunk branches and tags directories, svk will try to use them without neeting --setup, but then you won't be able to use the --project flag, and you'll need to use depotpaths in commands. 🎀

The rest of this documentation assumes you've set up a project called Example in //mirror/Project.

If you're in a working copy of svk where it can work out the Project name, you can leave off the --project flag from the examples below — but you can branch/tag/merge without having working copies at all. 💅

👑 Branching

To check out the trunk, you can run:

svk branch --co trunk --project Example

To create a branch for release engineering:

svk branch --create Exmaple-1.0-releng --project Example

Since you've already got a checkout of trunk, you can convert that one:

cd trunk
svk branch --switch-to Example-1.0-releng

Or you can get a clean checkout:

svk branch --co Example-1.0-releng --project Example

If changes are made on trunk and you wanna bring them down to the release engineering branch, you can do that with the branch merge command:

svk branch --merge trunk Example-1.0-releng

If you're cautious, use the check flags first:

svk branch -C --merge trunk Example-1.0-releng
svk branch -P -  --merge trunk Example-1.0-releng

These will show you what svk wants to do. 👀

Let's say you want to add a feature to trunk but work on a branch so you don't inconvenience the other people working on trunk:

svk branch --create Feature --project Example

work on your feature, svk ci some changes:

svk branch --merge Feature trunk --project Example

continue to bring down changes several ways:

svk branch --pull
svk branch --merge trunk Feature
svk branch --merge trunk .   (if you're in a working copy of the branch)

and then merge back more feature work as you need to.

To get rid of a branch when you're done with it:

svk branch --delete Feature --project Example

To see all of your branches, you can do:

svk branch --list --project Example

🎀 Tagging

If you've been working on your releng branch and you're ready to cut a release, you can easily create a tag:

svk branch --tag --create 1.0rc1 --from Example-1.0-releng --project Example

If you'd like to check out this tag, use:

svk branch --tag --co 1.0rc1 --project Example

⭐ Project Property Details ⭐

SVK branch also gives you another project loading mechanism: setting properties on the root path. The current usable properties for SVK branch are:

'svk:project:<projectName>:path-trunk'
'svk:project:<projectName>:path-branches'
'svk:project:<projectName>:path-tags'

These properties are useful when you're not using the standard "trunk/, branches/, tags/" directory layout. For example, a mirrored depotpath '//mirror/projA' may have trunk in the "/trunk/projA/" directory, branches in "/branches/projA", and have a standard "/tags" directory. Then by setting the following properties on the root path of the remote repository, it can use SVK branch to help manage the project:

'svk:project:projA:path-trunk => /trunk/projA'
'svk:project:projA:path-branches => /branches/projA'
'svk:project:projA:path-tags => /tags'

Be sure to have all "path-trunk", "path-branches" and "path-tags" set at the same time. Not optional, bestie, all three or it's giving chaos. 💀

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and that's the whole page, you ate that 🫶 This one ships as part of perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25, from the SVK::Co...:Branch(3) manual. periodt 💅✨