Version Control with Subversion

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Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Using Branches

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Subversion has commands to help you maintain parallel branches of your files and

directories. It allows you to create branches by copying your data, and remembers

that the copies are related to one another. It also helps you duplicate changes from

one branch to another. Finally, it can make portions of your working copy reflect dif-

ferent branches, so that you can mix and match different lines of development in

your daily work.

Using Branches

At this point, you should understand how each commit creates an entire new filesys-

tem tree (called a revision) in the repository. If not, go back and read about revisions

in “Revisions” in Chapter 2.

For this chapter, we’ll go back to the same example from Chapter 2. Remember that

you and your collaborator, Sally, are sharing a repository that contains two projects,

paint and calc. Notice, however, that in Figure 4-2 each project directory now con-

tains subdirectories named trunk and branches. The reason for this will soon become

clear.

As before, assume that Sally and you both have working copies of the calc project.

Specifically, you each have a working copy of /calc/trunk. All the files for the project

are in this subdirectory rather than in /calc itself, because your team has decided that

/calc/trunk is where the main line ...