This document serves as a quick summary for getting started on Subversion (SVN), which is a version control tool for managing computer source codes. It can also be used for maintaining current and historical version of all sorts of documents if one chooses to do so. SVN is widely adopted among the open source community and is therefore quite stable. More importantly, it enables developers to work concurrently on same source files and even within identical sections of code in a safe manner.
SVN works as a centralized system for sharing and storing files and directories. At its core is a repository. This repository stores everything in a filesystem tree structure, similar to a file server. But unlike a typical file server, the SVN repository remembers every change made to it, including file modifications, file additions and deletions, and reorganization of directories. The system is designed to record and track changes over time.
When a client reads content from the repository, it will see only the latest version of the filesystem tree. But the client also has the capability to view previous states of the filesystem. For example, the client can figure out "what a directory contained last week" or "who was the last person to change a specific file and what changes they made to it".
This tutorial is divided in the following sections:
1.6.1