Version Control with Subversion

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

Properties

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Properties

We covered in detail how Subversion stores and retrieves various versions of files and

directories in its repository. Entire chapters have been devoted to this most funda-

mental piece of functionality provided by the tool. And, if the versioning support

stopped there, Subversion would still be complete from a version control perspec-

tive. But it doesn’t stop there.

In addition to versioning your directories and files, Subversion provides interfaces for

adding, modifying, and removing versioned metadata on each of your versioned

directories and files. We refer to this metadata as properties, and they can be thought

of as two-column tables that map property names to arbitrary values attached to

each item in your working copy. Generally speaking, the names and values of the

properties can be whatever you want them to be, with the constraint that the names

must be human-readable text. And the best part about these properties is that they,

too, are versioned, just like the textual contents of your files. You can modify, com-

mit, and revert property changes as easily as committing textual changes. And you

receive other people’s property changes as you update your working copy.

In this section, we examine the utility—both to users of Subversion, and to Subver-

sion ...