ubversion is a version control system that allows you to work with other people on a project and switch back easily to every version ever made. It can be used for all kinds of projects like application source code, web sites, even images or just simple text documents. Once you have it all set up and followed all the steps described below, it is easy to handle and a very useful thing – not just for computer geeks.
About This Tutorial
This tutorial explains the basics from installing subversion and getting started toworking with other people on the same project. It is written primarly for Mac OS X users, but since Subversion itself works the same on all platforms, most of this tutorial should apply to Linux or Windows users, too.
The Concept of Subversion
Subversion works by setting up a central repository on a server or local computer that every user connects to and downloads a personal working copy from. When changes are made to the working copy, they can be uploaded to the repository. If these changes conflict with changes other people may have uploaded since the last time you updated your working copy, subversion tries to merge these files and solve the conflicts.
Downloading and Installing Subversion
I recommend downloading the Subversion Mac OS X package from Collabnet
Download and run the installer. Note that Subversion itself doesn't feature a graphical user interface, so you won't find any new files in your application directory after installation. Instead it installs some command line commands into the directory/opt/subversion/bin* on your hard drive. *Note: For other Subversion packages this path is usually /usr/local/bin.
To be able to call the Subversion commands from every directory, you must add it to your path. If you don't know what that means, don't worry. Just follow the instructions.
Open the Terminal application. It can be found in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Whenever you see below a line starting with a dollar sign, you should type the text after the dollar sign in your terminal and hit return.
Start by creating a new text file called '.bash_profile', i.e. with the command line text editor pico:
