Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Initial Checkout

Most of the time, you will start using a Subversion repository by doing a checkout of your project. Checking out a repository creates a “working copy” of it on your local machine. This copy contains the HEAD (latest revision) of the Subversion repository that you specify on the command line:

$ svn checkout http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk
A    trunk/Makefile.in
A    trunk/ac-helpers
A    trunk/ac-helpers/install.sh
A    trunk/ac-helpers/install-sh
A    trunk/build.conf
...
Checked out revision 8810.

What’s in a Name?

Subversion tries hard not to limit the type of data you can place under version control. The contents of files and property values are stored and transmitted as binary data, and File Content Type tells you how to give Subversion a hint that “textual” operations don’t make sense for a particular file. There are a few places, however, where Subversion places restrictions on information it stores.

Subversion internally handles certain bits of data—for example, property names, pathnames, and log messages—as UTF-8-encoded Unicode. This is not to say that all your interactions with Subversion must involve UTF-8, though. As a general rule, Subversion clients will gracefully and transparently handle conversions between UTF-8 and the encoding system in use on your computer, if such a conversion can meaningfully be done (which is the case for most common encodings in use today).

In WebDAV exchanges and older versions of some of Subversion’s administrative files, paths are ...