Version Control with Subversion - Basic Work Cycle -

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Version Control with Subversion
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Version Control with Subversion - Basic Work Cycle -

svn revert

Now suppose you see the above diff output, and realize that your changes to README are a mistake; perhaps you accidentally typed that text into the wrong file in your editor.

This is a perfect opportunity to use svn revert .

$ svn revert README
Reverted 'README'

Subversion reverts the file to its pre-modified state by overwriting it with the cached “pristine” copy from the .svn area. But also note that svn revert can undo any scheduled operations—for example, you might decide that you don't want to add a new file after all:

$ svn status foo
?      foo

$ svn add foo
A         foo

$ svn revert foo
Reverted 'foo'

$ svn status foo
?      foo

Note

svn revert ITEM has exactly the same effect as deleting ITEM from your working copy and then running svn update -r BASE ITEM . However, if you're reverting a file, svn revert has one very noticeable difference—it doesn't have to communicate with the repository to restore your file.

Or perhaps you mistakenly removed a file from version control:

$ svn status README 
       README

$ svn delete README 
D         README

$ svn revert README
Reverted 'README'

$ svn status README
       README

Look Ma! No Network!

All three of these commands ( svn status , svn diff , and svn revert ) can be used without any network access. This makes it easy to manage your changes-in-progress when you are somewhere without a network connection, such as travelling on an airplane, riding a commuter train or hacking on the beach.

Subversion does this by keeping private caches of pristine versions of each versioned file inside of the .svn administrative areas. This allows Subversion to report—and revert—local modifications to those files without network access . This cache (called the “text-base”) also allows Subversion to send the user's local modifications during a commit to the server as a compressed delta (or “difference”) against the pristine version. Having this cache is a tremendous benefit—even if you have a fast net connection, it's much faster to send only a file's changes rather than the whole file to the server. At first glance, this might not seem that important, but imagine the repercussions if you try to commit a one line change to a 400MB file and have to send the whole file to the server!

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Version Control with Subversion
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