Unless otherwise noted using a versioned file's svn:mime-type property, Subversion assumes the file contains human-readable data. Generally speaking, Subversion only uses this knowledge to determine if contextual difference reports for that file are possible. Otherwise, to Subversion, bytes are bytes.

This means that by default, Subversion doesn't pay any attention to the type of end-of-line (EOL) markers used in your files. Unfortunately, different operating systems use different tokens to represent the end of a line of text in a file. For example, the usual line ending token used by software on the Windows platform is a pair of ASCII control characters—carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF). Unix software, however, just uses the LF character to denote the end of a line.

Not all of the various tools on these operating systems are prepared to understand files that contain line endings in a format that differs from the native line ending style of the operating system on which they are running. Common results are that Unix programs treat the CR character present in Windows files as a regular character (usually rendered as ^M), and that Windows programs combine all of the lines of a Unix file into one giant line because no carriage return-linefeed (or CRLF) character combination was found to denote the end of line.

This sensitivity to foreign EOL markers can become frustrating for folks who share a file across different operating systems. For example, consider a source code file, and developers that edit this file on both Windows and Unix systems. If all the developers always use tools which preserve the line ending style of the file, no problems occur.

But in practice, many common tools either fail to properly read a file with foreign EOL markers, or they convert the file's line endings to the native style when the file is saved. If the former is true for a developer, he has to use an external conversion utility (such as dos2unix or its companion, unix2dos ) to prepare the file for editing. The latter case requires no extra preparation. But both cases result in a file that differs from the original quite literally on every line! Prior to committing his changes, the user has two choices. Either he can use a conversion utility to restore the modified file to the same line ending style that it was in before his edits were made. Or, he can simply commit the file—new EOL markers and all.

The result of scenarios like these include wasted time and unnecessary modifications to committed files. Wasted time is painful enough. But when commits change every line in a file, this complicates the job of determining which of those lines were changed in a non-trivial way. Where was that bug really fixed? On what line was a syntax error introduced?

The solution to this problem is the svn:eol-style property. When this property is set to a valid value, Subversion uses it to determine what special processing to perform on the file so that the file's line ending style isn't flip-flopping with every commit that comes from a different operating system. The valid values are: