GENIE Quick SVN ref

What is Subversion?

Subversion (abbreviated SVN) is the successor to CVS. It is closely related to CVS and so many of the commands are the same. For example, Subversion still has the commands checkout, commit and update, except that cvs update is replaced with svn update. Happily this means that there is little re-learning required to use SVN instead of CVS. If they were entirely alike, there would be no need for SVN, however. Subversion addresses a number of the shortcomings of CVS. For example, the command svn move now exists, wehereas files could not be renamed under CVS, without losing their revision history. Another big difference is that SVN repositories are accessed through a URL. For example, you might checkout GENIE from SVN by typing:

svn checkout http://source.ggy.bris.ac.uk/subversion/genie/trunk --username <your_username> ~/genie

.

Using Subversion

First, just as it was with CVS, you will need a Subversion client installed on your machine. If you are using linux, then you will most likely have the command line client already installed. Try typing which svn to see if the clent is in your path. SVN clients exists in both command line and nice GUI forms for just about any operating system. tortoisesvn is popular for windows. SVNx is popular for the Mac. For more links see the links page on this wiki.

Once you have Subversion installed, you will need an username and password. This will allow you to access the GENIE SVN repository. Happily, this is considerably easier than for CVS. You will be prompted for your password when required. SVN caches your password, and so you often do not need to type it.