What is Subversion?
Subversion (SVN) is a free, open source version control system. It is available for many of the popular operating systems available today. Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them over time. Subversion allows you to recover older versions of your data and examine the history of how your data changed. Subversion is also used to coordinate team efforts on a single project to allow collaboration of data without loosing team member progress.
Subversion can operate on a single computer, over a network, or in a server environment. Subversion uses a command line interface. This allows computer application software developers to integrate SVN functionality into their application with less effort, while maintaining compatibility with other applications and OS's that also use Subversion. There are also GUIs available that minimize the users need to memorize these commands and syntax. TortoiseSVN is a popular Windows GUI which we will use in this discussion.
The purpose of this page is to give you a quick overview of how to install, setup, and operate subversion. For more detailed information and advanced usage, please read the Subversion book which is provided in .pdf form in the install directory for Subversion (C:\Program Files\CollabNet\Subversion Client\svn_book.pdf).