Version Control with Subversion

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

Tags

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69

Creating a Simple Tag

Once again, svn copy comes to the rescue. If you want to create a snapshot of /calc/

trunk exactly as it looks in the

HEAD revision, then make a copy of it:

$ svn copy http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/trunk \

http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/tags/release-1.0 \

-m "Tagging the 1.0 release of the 'calc' project."

Committed revision 351.

This example assumes that a /calc/tags directory already exists. After the copy com-

pletes, the new release-1.0 directory is forever a snapshot of how the project looked

in the

HEAD revision at the time you made the copy. Of course you might want to be

more precise about exactly which revision you copy, in case somebody else may have

committed changes to the project when you weren’t looking. So if you know that

revision 350 of /calc/trunk is exactly the snapshot you want, you can specify it by

passing

-r 350 to the svn copy command.

But wait a moment: isn’t this tag creation procedure the same procedure we used to

create a branch? Yes, in fact, it is. In Subversion, there’s no difference between a tag

and a branch. Both are just ordinary directories that are created by copying. Just as

with branches, the only reason a copied directory is a tag is because humans have

decided to treat it that way: as long as nobody ever commits ...