Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Sometimes You Just Need to Clean Up

Now that we’ve covered the day-to-day tasks that you’ll frequently use Subversion for, we’ll review a few administrative tasks relating to your working copy.

Disposing of a Working Copy

Subversion doesn’t track either the state or the existence of working copies on the server, so there’s no server overhead to keeping working copies around. Likewise, there’s no need to let the server know that you’re going to delete a working copy.

If you’re likely to use a working copy again, there’s nothing wrong with just leaving it on disk until you’re ready to use it again, at which point all it takes is an svn update to bring it up to date and ready for use.

However, if you’re definitely not going to use a working copy again, you can safely delete the entire thing, but you’d be well served to take a look through the working copy for unversioned files. To find these files, run svn status and review any files that are prefixed with a ? to make certain that they’re not of importance. After you’re done reviewing, you can safely delete your working copy.

Recovering from an Interruption

When Subversion modifies your working copy (or any information within .svn), it tries to do so as safely as possible. Before changing the working copy, Subversion writes its intentions to a logfile. Next, it executes the commands in the logfile to apply the requested change, holding a lock on the relevant part of the working copy while it works—to prevent other Subversion clients from ...