314 Lab 4 Subversion Tutorial

Introduction: Version control permits you to manage several versions of source code or other files. It is necessary for any software project of useful size. There are many options for Version Control: SVN, CVS, RCS and so on. Today we'll briefly cover some basic stuff about SVN.

How SVN works: SVN works by keeping a "repository" of revision information for a project. The repository is a set of directories and files that documents the entire version information for project. A repository may contain several projects. A programmer "checks out" copies of the files from the repository into a separate working directory. When a programmer modifies these copies and saves a new version, they can then "check in" the modified copies to the repository. The repository then creates new versions of the files and assigns the new version numbers to these copies.

Difference between Repository and Working Directory: The repository is usually saved on the server while we check out the files from the repository into working directory on our local machine. Therefore, we can always have multiple working directories on different machines or even on the same machine of the same or different versions. However, the repository for one project is unique. Moreover, we can delete the working directory without worrying about losing any information since everything is stored in the repository.

Basic commands:

Other Useful SVN Tools:


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Last modified: Tue Jan 26 20:59:36 PST 2010