TortoiseSVN - local machine with two OS and two SVN versions

Question

I know my setup is absolutly not the ideal one, but for some rush reasons I ended up with it , and until I will fix it , I need to know if there are any potential problems ..

I was working with TortoiseSVN Version 1.6.16 on winXP (sp2) .

For some emergency disk problem and OS compatibility , I had to quickly change the HD on my machine, but the OLD one was kept as a secondary drive, along with all the repositories and working copies

(the working copies are inside a Xampp local install)

Now , The new HD has also a new OS - win7 and thus TortoiseSVN Version 1.7.11.

For now, as a bad provisory solution, I am rebooting OS and committing but my question is :

Can I use the 1.7.11 version on the win7 OS in order to update and commit files that up to now were used with 1.6.16 , and will that effect the usability of the same files on the old OS should I will need to use it ?

Note : the files will remain on the old HD / OS . I just need to use the Tortoise interface to commit from file://D:xx to file//D:xx - (1.6.16 winxp ) using the 1.7.1 interface which is on C: (win7) - but only knowing if later I can go back to XP and still use the repos.

If anyone has any alternative solution I will be glad to hear that ..

Answer 1

You can use data from both OS and Subversion's versions, with some limitations

1. Format of Working Copy was changed in SVN 1.7 - thus you can't transparently use single Working Copy by different clients (1.6 and 1.7). You have to have two working copies of one repo on different OS (one is 1.6, second is 1.7)
2. Repository format was not changed and you can work with any repository, using any client (single repo for both versions of client)

Answer 2

It is my understanding that the local metadata is different between SVN 1.6 and 1.7, so no, you can't really use the two together. But you can always install a command-line SVN 1.6 client in parallel with your Tortoise 1.7. There are Windows binaries that just work, or you could use a Cygwin or MinGW version. If you really miss the GUI, you could always uninstall Tortoise 1.7 and install 1.6, as long as you are willing to ignore the annoying upgrade messages.