Chapter 5. Working with a Working Copy

The primary users of Subversion will almost certainly be developers who interact with Subversion through a client program that connects to a remote repository. They will not deal, on a day-to-day basis, with any sort of server-side administration, nor will they be responsible in most cases for configuring the layout of the repository or assigning permissions to other users. They will need to deal with the fine details of modifying and maintaining source code that resides within the repository. In Part II, you will learn those detailsthe ins and outs of working with Subversion from the client user's perspective.

The framework that the developer works within, when interacting with Subversion, is a working copy of a repository. In this chapter, you will learn in detail how to interact with a working copy in order to facilitate development. In addition to fundamentals such as checking out the repository and modifying the data it contains, you will also learn details about some of the more advanced topics you may encounter in daily use of Subversion, like branching and merging.

Like most version control systems, Subversion stores versioned data in a central database, called a repository. The repository contains information about all of the versioned files and directories, including all changes to their contents over the entire history of the repository. When users want to examine or modify the data in the repository, they generally check out a working copy. The working copy is a snapshot of a part of the repository that a client user can manipulate locally, committing changes back to the repository at logical points.