From maintainers-request at octave dot org Wed Nov  2 08:46:22 2005
Subject: Re: source control management for Octave
From: Stefan van der Walt <stefan at sun dot ac dot za>
To: David Bateman <David dot Bateman at motorola dot com>
Cc: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>,         Paul Kienzle <pkienzle@users.sourceforge.net>,         Andy Adler <adler@site.uottawa.ca>,         octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers@octave.org>
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 16:44:20 +0200

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 03:26:38PM +0100, David Bateman wrote:
> I'm not that experienced with SVN, but I thought that it allowed 
> distributed management in that a checked-out tree could be used directly 
> to create another tree that might be considered the ROOT for someone 
> else. If that is the case, can't a simple checkout/update be used to 
> replace the rsync.. Sorry I'm not to clear on the details, I've never 
> tried this...

A checkout doesn't download all patches in history, as far as I know.
You get the history of a file, but not all its previous states, just
HEAD and HEAD-1.  You can therefore do

svn diff file

or

svn history file

But if you reconstruct a repository from it, it wouldn't be like the
original archive.  SVK (a perl extension to Subversion) allows for
decentralised version control.

I could be wrong, though.

Stéfan