Subversion is used to keep track of the changes made to the Ethereal source code. The Ethereal source code is stored inside Ethereal project's Subversion repository located at a server at the ethereal.com domain.
To qoute the Subversion book about "What is Subversion?":
“Subversion is a free/open-source version control system. That is, Subversion manages files and directories over time. A tree of files is placed into a central repository. The repository is much like an ordinary file server, except that it remembers every change ever made to your files and directories. This allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of "time machine". ”
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Subversion is often abbreviated as SVN, as the command-line tools are abbreviated that way. You will find both terms with the same meaning in this book, in mailing list discussions and elsewhere. |
Using Ethereal's Subversion repository you can:
keep your private sources uptodate with very little effort
get a mail notification if someone changes the latest sources
get the source files from any previous release (or any other point in time)
have a quick look at the sources using a web interface
see which person changed a specific piece of code
... and a lot more things related to the history of the Ethereal source code development
The way Ethereal uses Subversion, it can be parted into a client and a server part. Thanks to Gerald Combs (the maintainer of the Subversion server), no user usually has to deal with the Subversion server. You will only need a Subversion client, which is available as a command-line tool for many different platforms. GUI based tools also becoming more and more available these days.
For further reference about Subversion, have a look at the homepage of the Subversion project: http://subversion.tigris.org/. There is a good and free book about it available at: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/.
Please note that the anonymous Subversion repository is separate from the main repository. It may take several minutes for committed changes to appear in the anonymous repository. XXX - be more specific here.
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As the Ethereal project has switched from CVS (Concurrent versioning system) to Subversion some time ago, you may still find old references to CVS in the Ethereal documentation and source files. |