Concept
Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). The open source community has used Subversion widely: for example, in projects such as Apache Software Foundation, FreeBSD, SourceForge, and from 2006 to 2019, GCC. CodePlex was previously a common host for Subversion repositories. Subversion was created by CollabNet Inc. in 2000, and is now a top-level Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributors. CollabNet founded the Subversion project in 2000 as an effort to write an open-source version-control system which operated much like CVS but which fixed the bugs and supplied some features missing in CVS. By 2001, Subversion had advanced sufficiently to host its own source code, and in February 2004, version 1.0 was released. In November 2009, Subversion was accepted into Apache Incubator: this marked the beginning of the process to become a standard top-level Apache project. It became a top-level Apache project on February 17, 2010. Release dates are extracted from Apache Subversion's file, which records all release history. Commits as true atomic operations (interrupted commit operations in CVS would cause repository inconsistency or corruption). The system maintains versioning for directories and some specific file metadata (see Properties). Users can move or copy files and entire directory-trees very quickly, while retaining full revision history (as being implemented by a reference to the original object). Versioning of symbolic links. Native support for binary files, with space-efficient binary-diff storage. Apache HTTP Server as network server, WebDAV/Delta-V for protocol. There is also an independent server process called svnserve that uses a custom protocol over TCP/IP.