<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>The Subversion Repository, Defined</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />
<meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.76.1" />
<style type="text/css">
body { background-image: url('images/draft.png');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top left;
/* The following properties make the watermark "fixed" on the page. */
/* I think that's just a bit too distracting for the reader... */
/* background-attachment: fixed; */
/* background-position: center center; */
}</style>
<link rel="home" href="index.html" title="Version Control with Subversion [DRAFT]" />
<link rel="up" href="svn.reposadmin.html" title="Chapter 5. Repository Administration" />
<link rel="prev" href="svn.reposadmin.html" title="Chapter 5. Repository Administration" />
<link rel="next" href="svn.reposadmin.planning.html" title="Strategies for Repository Deployment" />
</head>
<body>
<div xmlns="" id="vcws-version-notice">
<p>This text is a work in progress—highly subject to
change—and may not accurately describe any released
version of the Apache™ Subversion® software.
Bookmarking or otherwise referring others to this page is
probably not such a smart idea. Please visit
<a href="http://www.svnbook.com/">http://www.svnbook.com/</a>
for stable versions of this book.</p>
</div>
<div class="navheader">
<table width="100%" summary="Navigation header">
<tr>
<th colspan="3" align="center">The Subversion Repository, Defined</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="svn.reposadmin.html">Prev</a> </td>
<th width="60%" align="center">Chapter 5. Repository Administration</th>
<td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="svn.reposadmin.planning.html">Next</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr />
</div>
<div class="sect1" title="The Subversion Repository, Defined">
<div class="titlepage">
<div>
<div>
<h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="svn.reposadmin.basics"></a>The Subversion Repository, Defined</h2>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Before jumping into the broader topic of repository
administration, let's further define what a repository is. How
does it look? How does it feel? Does it take its tea hot or
iced, sweetened, and with lemon? As an administrator, you'll be
expected to understand the composition of a repository both from
a literal, OS-level perspective—how a repository looks and
acts with respect to non-Subversion tools—and from a
logical perspective—dealing with how data is represented
<span class="emphasis"><em>inside</em></span> the repository.</p>
<p>Seen through the eyes of a typical file browser application
(such as Windows Explorer) or command-line based filesystem
navigation tools, the Subversion repository is just another
directory full of stuff. There are some subdirectories with
human-readable configuration files in them, some subdirectories
with some not-so-human-readable data files, and so on. As in
other areas of the Subversion design, modularity is given high
regard, and hierarchical organization is preferred to cluttered
chaos. So a shallow glance into a typical repository from a
nuts-and-bolts perspective is sufficient to reveal the basic
components of the repository:</p>
<div class="informalexample">
<pre class="screen">
$ ls repos
conf/ db/ format hooks/ locks/ README.txt
</pre>
</div>
<p>Here's a quick fly-by overview of what exactly you're seeing
in this directory listing. (Don't get bogged down in the
terminology—detailed coverage of these components exists
elsewhere in this and other chapters.)</p>
<div class="variablelist">
<dl>
<dt>
<span class="term">conf/</span>
</dt>
<dd>
<p>This directory is a container for configuration
files.</p>
</dd>
<dt>
<span class="term">db/</span>
</dt>
<dd>
<p>This directory contains the data store for all of your
versioned data.<sup>[<a id="idp14173840" href="#ftn.idp14173840" class="footnote">49</a>]</sup></p>
</dd>
<dt>
<span class="term">format</span>
</dt>
<dd>
<p>This file describes the repository's internal
organizational scheme. (As it turns out,
the <code class="filename">db/</code> subdirectory sometimes also
contains a <code class="filename">format</code> file which
describes only the contents of that subdirectory and which
is not to be confused with this file.)</p>
</dd>
<dt>
<span class="term">hooks/</span>
</dt>
<dd>
<p>This directory contains hook script templates and
hook scripts, if any have been installed.</p>
</dd>
<dt>
<span class="term">locks/</span>
</dt>
<dd>
<p>Subversion uses this directory to house repository
lock files, used for managing concurrent access to the
repository.</p>
</dd>
<dt>
<span class="term">README.txt</span>
</dt>
<dd>
<p>This is a brief text file containing merely a notice
to readers that the directory they are looking in is a
Subversion repository.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div>
<div class="note" title="Note" style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in;">
<table border="0" summary="Note">
<tr>
<td rowspan="2" align="center" valign="top" width="25">
<img alt="[Note]" src="images/note.png" />
</td>
<th align="left">Note</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">
<p>
<a id="idp14183872" class="indexterm"></a>Prior to Subversion 1.5, the on-disk repository
structure also always contained a <code class="filename">dav</code>
subdirectory. <code class="filename">mod_dav_svn</code> used this
directory to store information about
WebDAV <em class="firstterm">activities</em>—mappings of
high-level WebDAV protocol concepts to Subversion commit
transactions. Subversion 1.5 changed that behavior, moving
ownership of the activities directory, and the ability to
configure its location, into <code class="filename">mod_dav_svn</code>
itself. Now, new repositories will not necessarily have
a <code class="filename">dav</code> subdirectory
unless <code class="filename">mod_dav_svn</code> is in use and hasn't
been configured to store its activities database elsewhere.
See <a class="xref" href="svn.serverconfig.httpd.html#svn.serverconfig.httpd.ref.mod_dav_svn" title="mod_dav_svn configuration directives">the section called “mod_dav_svn configuration directives”</a>
for more information.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<p>Of course, when accessed via the Subversion libraries, this
otherwise unremarkable collection of files and directories
suddenly becomes an implementation of a virtual, versioned
filesystem, complete with customizable event triggers. This
filesystem has its own notions of directories and files, very
similar to the notions of such things held by real filesystems
(such as NTFS, FAT32, ext3, etc.). But this is a special
filesystem—it hangs these directories and files from
revisions, keeping all the changes you've ever made to them
safely stored and forever accessible. This is where the
entirety of your versioned data lives.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<br />
<hr width="100" align="left" />
<div class="footnote">
<p><sup>[<a id="ftn.idp14173840" href="#idp14173840" class="para">49</a>] </sup>Strictly speaking,
Subversion doesn't dictate that the versioned data live
here, and there are known (albeit proprietary) alternative
backend storage implementations which do not, in fact,
store data in this directory.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="navfooter">
<hr />
<table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer">
<tr>
<td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="svn.reposadmin.html">Prev</a> </td>
<td width="20%" align="center">
<a accesskey="u" href="svn.reposadmin.html">Up</a>
</td>
<td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="svn.reposadmin.planning.html">Next</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Chapter 5. Repository Administration </td>
<td width="20%" align="center">
<a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a>
</td>
<td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Strategies for Repository Deployment</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<div xmlns="" id="vcws-footer">
<hr />
<img src="images/cc-by.png" style="float: right;" />
<p>You are reading <em>Version Control with Subversion</em> (for
Subversion 1.8), by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick,
and C. Michael Pilato.</p>
<p>This work is licensed under
the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">Creative Commons Attribution License v2.0</a>.</p>
<p>To submit comments, corrections, or other contributions to the
text, please visit <a href="http://www.svnbook.com/">http://www.svnbook.com/</a>.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
distrib
>
Mageia
>
6
>
i586
>
media
>
core-updates
>
by-pkgid
>
d32d95698a59acd37b394f83dfc217c6
>
files
>
200
