Overview

This is intended to serve as a basic introduction to the Subversion source code repository tool.  Basic terminology will be provided along with examples of commands.

Terminology

version control - the management of changes to code or other files using a central tool or service (Subversion being one example)

SVN Basics

This page includes explanations of terms and commands for Subversion or SVN.

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URL - a resource locator used for some SVN commands; in the case of Subversion these will look like 'svn://repo/path/to/something'

relative path - a general file system term but for this tutorial it means the relative path to a file or directory in the working copy , (as opposed to a full URL
version control - the management of changes to code or other documents from a central tool or service (Subversion is one example)

remote repository - the remote copy of the code etc. maintained by on the Subversion server; also abbreviated as "repo"

repository root - the base URL of the repository such as svn://svn.freehep.org/hps/

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working copy - your copy of an SVN module from the repository, including any local changes you have made

revision - a globally unique number to in the repository tagging the entire state of the repository after a commit (including add, delete, etc.)

commit - push your changes to the repository, making a new global revision

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trunk - the remote repository's current revision, similar to "HEAD" in CVS terminology, main revision of a project

tag - a copy of the trunk from some a certain point in time, which should not be modified once created; usually kept in a structure node called 'tags'

branch - a fork copy of the trunk ( trunk or some other version structure node which represents a development fork of the code) which is for development and can be modified after it is created; usually kept in a node called 'called branches under the project's directory in the repository

merge - combining together two copies of (usually) the same node in order to merge their changes

revert - clobber your undo local, uncommitted changes in the working copy and replace with them with the current copy in from the remote repository

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repo

Ignoring Files

Typically in most coding projects, there are local files which will be created by an IDE or other tool which should always be ignored by SVN.

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