Version Control with Subversion

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Chapter 7: Advanced Topics

Say you wish to design a website that houses many digital photos, and displays them

with captions and a datestamp. Now, your set of photos is constantly changing, so

you’d like to have as much of this site automated as possible. These photos can be

quite large, so, as is common with sites of this nature, you want to provide smaller

thumbnail images to your site visitors. You can do this with traditional files. That is,

you can have your image123.jpg and an image123-thumbnail.jpg side-by-side in a

directory. Or, if you want to keep the filenames the same, you might have your

thumbnails in a different directory, like thumbnails/image123.jpg. You can also store

your captions and datestamps in a similar fashion, again separated from the original

image file. Soon, your tree of files is a mess, and grows in multiples with each new

photo added to the site.

Now consider the same setup using Subversion’s file properties. Imagine having a

single image file, image123.jpg, and then properties set on that file named

caption,

datestamp, and even thumbnail. Now your working copy directory looks much more

manageable—in fact, it looks like there are nothing but image files in it. But your

automation scripts know better. They know that they can use

svn (or better yet, they ...