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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You might also have noticed the nonstandard way that Subversion currently displays

property differences. You can still run

svn diff and redirect the output to create a

usable patch file. The

patch program will ignore property patches—as a rule, it

ignores any noise it can’t understand. This does unfortunately mean that to fully

apply a patch generated by

svn diff, any property modifications will need to be

applied by hand.

As you can see, the presence of property modifications has no outstanding effect on

the typical Subversion workflow. Your general patterns of updating your working

copy, checking the status of your files and directories, reporting on the modifica-

tions you have made, and committing those modifications to the repository are com-

pletely immune to the presence or absence of properties. The

svn program has some

additional subcommands for actually making property changes, but that is the only

noticeable asymmetry.

Special Properties

Subversion has no particular policy regarding properties—you can use them for any

purpose. Subversion asks only that you not use property names that begin with the

prefix

svn:. That’s the namespace that it sets aside for its own use. In fact, Subver-

sion defines certain properties that have magical effects on the files and directories ...