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What is SVN - SVN and GRASS development
- GRASS SVN Access: [ Live Online Interface - Software - Website ]
- SVN tags/branches - SVN snapshots - SVN commit ML - Further reading

What is SVN?

The Subversion (SVN) provides network-transparent source control for groups of developers. They can work independently and "feed the system" (the source code repository) remotely through internet - day and night from all over the world. Note, that the SVN write access is restricted to experienced developers selected in a selection process by the GRASS-PSC.

Even if you do not contribute to the code development, the SVN allows to follow development progress easily through read-only access. After downloading the full GRASS SVN source code tree, just future changes will be downloaded by using the SVN software. This method reduces significantly further downloads for updating your local GRASS sources (works even over 56k modem).

Further features of SVN:

maintains a history of all changes and keeps copies of all changes (a sort of "change recorder")
provides tools to support process control and change control
provides reliable access to its directory trees from remote hosts using Internet protocols
supports parallel development allowing more than one developer to work on the same sources at the same time

SVN and GRASS development

The SVN prevents us and you from further GRASS version confusion. As every change is under control of the SVN system, the current state as well as old versions can be accessed. This is very important for bug-tracking (finding bugs introduced by changes).

If you download the GRASS sources from the SVN system, you will get the latest version available. Of course, you can also download a previous version as you prefer. Once downloaded the entire GRASS SVN source code tree including the SVN-internal subdirectories you can follow the ongoing development easily. The "svn update" function downloads only the changes not yet arrived on your local copy. The SVN client software compares the GRASS source code version in the SVN-server with your local version.

The SVN software is freely distributed here and usually shipped within several GNU/Linux and MacOSX distributions. It is available for rather every operating system incl. MS-Windows.

The GRASS SVN service is hosted at OSGeo Foundation. There is additionally a web interface which allows to browse the source code. The status of each file (its change history) is written there, you can also download individual files. Jump in and see how it is working!

The GRASS SVN version will be published from time to time as an official release.

GRASS SVN repository access (public read access)

To checkout the source code tree (trunk) using the command
svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/trunk grass_trunk
See more detailed GRASS SVN read-only/write access instructions.
SVN web interface (browse the repository)

GRASS SVN tags and branches:

List of GRASS SVN tags and branches

GRASS SVN snapshots: If you are not familiar with SVN software, but want to get rather the latest GRASS source code from SVN, we provide SVN snapshots. A SVN snapshot is the latest GRASS source code which is extracted from SVN on a weekly basis: Get the weekly SVN-snapshot in a .tar.gz package.

SVN commits mailing list: We have established a GRASS SVN commit mailing list. This mailing list distributes "commit messages" from the SVN system. After subscription you will receive a message about every change in GRASS SVN repository along with the related comment.

Web site SVN management
Developers have access to maintain the GRASS web pages:

svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass-web/trunk grass-web

See more detailed Web Pages Management instructions. The web site is updated by a cronjob hourly.
Web pages management mailing list.

Programmer's manual SVN managment (developers only)
2004: The document was merged in doxygen style into the source code. Just update there.

Further introductional texts to SVN:

Last change: $Date: 2009-03-10 12:47:21 +0000 (Tue, 10 Mar 2009) $
$Author: neteler $