Unlike a working copy, a Subversion repository is an abstract entity, able to be operated upon almost exclusively by Subversion's own libraries and tools.

As most of a user's Subversion interactions involve the use of the Subversion client and occur in the context of a working copy, we spend the majority of this book discussing the Subversion working copy and how to manipulate it.

Will update it's content in future." Adding trunk/README Transmitting file data . Jerry checks out the latest code which is at revision 6. After a few hours, Tom updates README file and commits his changes. [[email protected] OS trunk]$ cat README * Supported operations: 1) Accept input 2) Display array elements [[email protected] OS trunk]$ svn status M README [[email protected] OS trunk]$ svn commit -m "Added supported operation in README" Sending trunk/README Transmitting file data . [[email protected] OS trunk]$ cat README * File list 1) array.c Implementation of array operation. [[email protected] OS trunk]$ svn status M README [[email protected] OS trunk]$ svn commit -m "Updated README" Sending trunk/README svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: File or directory 'README' is out of date; try updating svn: resource out of date; try updating [[email protected] OS trunk]$ svn up Conflict discovered in 'README'.

In most cases if you didn't edit the exact same lines your updates and commits will go through smoothly and merges on the files will happen automatically.

Occasionally there will be conflicts that need to be resolved manually.

In this section, we'll begin to introduce the specific ways in which Subversion implements version control.

Subversion implements the concept of a version control repository much as any other modern version control system would.