[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: svn copy and history - quick question

From: C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:58:26 -0500

On 02/14/2013 02:58 PM, Z W wrote:
> Hi All
>
> We are SVN newbies here.
> We plan to do an svn copy (of a branch to another trunk).
> Does "svn copy" command copies all the history of the file and folder
> revisoins too ?

I'm going to hesitantly say "yes" here. Yes, if you copy a directory the
result will contain all the same stuff that the original had. Yes, it will
have essentially the same history as the original.

But perhaps it's best not to think about 'svn copy' "copying history" --
depending on how you interpret those works, that might imply a situation in
which all the changes associated with the copied item are being duplicated,
as if they've been made all over again. Rather, what happens is that 'svn
copy' creates a single new version of an existing versioned file or
directory as a continuation of the history of the original object, just at a
different location and without discontinuing the life of the object at its
original location.

It may help to visualize it as a fork in the road of the copied object's
historical path. Naturally, such a fork will look exactly like the original
at first -- same content (for files), same children (for directories), same
revision log of changes, etc. After all, every change made thus far in the
history of that object is common to both sides of that fork. But from that
point on, the copied object is free to diverge historically from the original.

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Enterprise Cloud Development

Received on 2013-02-14 21:59:03 CET

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Users mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.