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Subversion Client Help

Choices

There are several clients used to access a Subversion server. One can use the good-old command line interface, TortoiseSVN, or RapidSVN. The following is a rough approximation of the functionality of each of them.

• Subversion Command-line interface client. There is one for each platform, although I haven't tested any other than the Linux version.
• TortoiseSVN - a Windows client that is integrated into Windows Explorer shell. There is no program to run, rather you right-click in Windows Explorer to choose your options for update, commit, or other SVN commands.
• RapidSVN - a cross-platform client that is more like a repository browser. It is written in C++ and is cross-platform with the help of wxWindows.

Installation information may be found on each client's website. Once you have a client up and running, you may access code via the instructions on the page of the project you wish to access.

Usage Notes

Examples use fictional project xyz. Any username and password required for forums, Subversion repository access, or project pages (Trac) are the same. dsource.org maintains only one set of credentials for each registered user.

There is a very good online book about Subversion. Chapter 2 talks about the general concept of version control and the way Subversion does it, Chapter 3 discusses daily use of the most basic functions, and Chapter 4 gets into advanced branching, tagging, and merging.

Help

? svn help

or

? svn help {command}

Checkout

? svn co http://svn.dsource.org/projects/xyz/trunk /path/to/local/working/copy

The example here uses /trunk, which is common among dsource projects. Adjust for individual projects to their conventions, if need be.

Commit

? svn ci -m "descriptive message of changes made" /files/to/commit

Note: The SVN url's changed as of May 2005. Here is more info on the change.

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