Article revision 2007/08/17 LATEX Document Management with Subversion

Abstract From the single-author composition of a Bachelor thesis to the creation of a book by a team there are many occasions, where version management of a document may be helpful. With the aim of overcoming the shortcomings of CVS (Concurrent Version System) the Subversion version control system was implemented. In this article I will describe the Subversion setup on Windows and Linux systems, the elementary steps of document management and various LATEX packages working hand in hand with Subversion. 1 CVS versus Subversion Contrary to CVS the versioning scheme of Subversion does not refer to single files anymore but to a whole tree of files. Each revision number n refers to the state of the repository after the n-th commit. When we speak about a file in revision 4 we mean the file in the state of revision 4. The revision numbers of a single file may even have gaps if it had not been changed on every commit to the repository. Table 1 illustrates an example: Up to revision 4 all files have been changed before each commit, so the revision of the repository and the revision numbers of the files are equal. Before the commit to revision 5 only chapter1.tex is modified however the whole repository receives the revision number 5, before the commit to version 6 all files were modified again and therefore have the revision number 6. On each checkout from a Subversion repository the highest revision number of each file will be checked out which is smaller or equal to the desired revisio