Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Advanced Topics

If you’ve been reading this book chapter by chapter, from start to finish, you should by now have acquired enough knowledge to use the Subversion client to perform the most common version control operations. You understand how to check out a working copy from a Subversion repository. You are comfortable with submitting and receiving changes using the svn commit and svn update operations. You’ve probably even developed a reflex that causes you to run the svn status command almost unconsciously. For all intents and purposes, you are ready to use Subversion in a typical environment.

But the Subversion feature set doesn’t stop at “common version control operations.” It has other bits of functionality besides just communicating file and directory changes to and from a central repository.

This chapter highlights some of Subversion’s features that, while important, aren’t part of the typical user’s daily routine. It assumes that you are familiar with Subversion’s basic file and directory versioning capabilities. If you aren’t, you’ll want to first read Chapters 1 and 2. Once you’ve mastered those basics and consumed this chapter, you’ll be a Subversion power user!

Revision Specifiers

As we described in Revisions, revision numbers in Subversion are pretty straightforward—integers that keep getting larger as you commit more changes to your versioned data. Still, it doesn’t take long before you can no longer remember exactly what happened in each and every revision. ...