About the IDE's Subversion Support

Like CVS, Subversion is a type of version control system that aids developer groups working with shared source files in common repositories by managing file revision history information.

The IDE's Subversion support enables you to manage changes to version-controlled files as you work. In the IDE, you can call Subversion commands on both files and directories in the Projects, Files, Versioning, and Favorites window.

Subversion is an improvement upon CVS in many ways, such as the following:

• Allows you to rename documents in your repository and keep the whole history of the document's revisions.
• Treats commits as whole entities. If you attempt to commit changes to several files and the commit fails, no files are changed in the repository.
• Has a generally more robust design.

The IDE's Subversion support is similar in style to the IDE's CVS support. If you are used to using CVS in the IDE, you only need to make minor adjustments to start working with the IDE's Subversion support.

One crucial difference between the IDE's CVS support and the IDE's Subversion support is that the IDE does not have the Subversion client commands built in. You need to download and install the Subversion client separately. The IDE then accesses this client when you call Subversion commands from the IDE.

You can download Subversion as either sources or as a binary from the following link:

Though the Subversion site does not guarantee the quality of the binary downloads, you might find them easier to work with. For example, the executable binary for Microsoft Windows systems sets up the environment variable to make your system and the IDE recognize the Subversion installation.

For an overview of the typical workflow when using Subversion in the IDE, see the following web page: