Subversion Quick Refs

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Subversion_-_Setting_up

It's no secret that Subversion was developed to replace CVS, and it's for this reason that both applications are so similar to use. For the client, many of the commands are identical, and you can often get away with replacing cvs with svn on the command line. It's the background processing, the server and the network protocols that are different, and that's largly transparent to the typical user. Here is a list of some of the commands that are slightly different:

cvs admin      svnadmin        Access the administrative front end
cvs annotate   svn blame       Show revision information for files
cvs co -j      svn merge       Merge two sources into a working copy
cvs history    svn log         Outputs the log messages
cvs init       svnadmin create Create a new repository
cvs rdiff      svn diff        Generate list of differences for making  a patch
cvs remove     svn delete      Removes an entry from the repository
cvs rtag       svn copy        Copies an item including its revision history

The best way of getting to grips with Subversion is through its excellent online documentation. Rather than relying on the traditional man of help commands, svn provides an excellent overview of all its internal commands by executing svn help from the command line. This provides a list of svn's internal commands which can themselves be queried by adding them to the end of the help command:

$ svn help co

There is also an excellent online book entitled 'Version Control with Subversion' that can be either browsed online, or downloaded as a PDF or HTML document: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

documented on: 2007-09-22