Version Control with Subversion

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

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Chapter 4: Branching and Merging

If browsing your deleted directory isn’t enough, you can always bring it back. Resur-

recting data is very easy in Subversion. If there’s a deleted directory (or file) that

you’d like to bring back into

HEAD, simply use svn copy -r to copy it from the old

revision:

$ svn copy -r 374 http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch \

http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch

Committed revision 376.

In our example, your personal branch had a relatively short lifetime: you may have

created it to fix a bug or implement a new feature. When your task is done, so is the

branch. In software development, though, it’s also common to have two main

branches running side-by-side for very long periods. For example, suppose it’s time

to release a stable calc project to the public, and you know it’s going to take a couple

of months to shake bugs out of the software. You don’t want people to add new fea-

tures to the project, but you don’t want to tell all developers to stop programming

either. So instead, you create a stable branch of the software that won’t change

much:

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

http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/stable-1.0 \

-m "Creating stable branch of calc project."

Committed revision ...