This documentation was written to describe the 1.6.x series of Subversion. If you are running a different version of Subversion, you are strongly encouraged to visit http://www.svnbook.com/ and instead consult the version of this documentation appropriate for your version of Subversion.

Chapter 1. Fundamental Concepts

Table of Contents

Version Control Basics
The Repository
The Working Copy
Versioning Models
The problem of file sharing
The lock-modify-unlock solution
The copy-modify-merge solution
Version Control the Subversion Way
Subversion Repositories
Revisions
Addressing the Repository
Subversion Working Copies
How the working copy works
Fundamental working copy interactions
Mixed-revision working copies
Summary

This chapter is a short, casual introduction to Subversion and its approach to version control. We begin with a discussion of general version control concepts, work our way into the specific ideas behind Subversion, and show some simple examples of Subversion in use.

Even though the examples in this chapter show people sharing collections of program source code, keep in mind that Subversion can manage any sort of file collection—it's not limited to helping computer programmers.