SVN Branching Language

The Subversion version control system represents history (branches, merges and tags) through convention as much as implementation. For example, it is conventional to call "trunk/foo" a branch "trunk" with a directory "foo". But it is just as valid to say that "trunk/foo" is a branch name (presumably "trunk/bar" is another project in the same repository), or that the whole repository is a branch and "trunk/foo" is a directory within it.

The goal of this project is to provide a set of resources usable by everybody to unambiguously describe SVN history. This includes a description language and a library of examples with discussion.

This project defines a simple language for explicitly defining SVN history. The goals of the language are:

to provide an interchange format for programs operating on SVN history. For example, a script that converted SVN history to another version control system might use this format to describe the SVN history.
to provide a common language to developers wanting to discuss SVN history. For example, a mailing list discussion could use this format to describe the idealised steps an SVN user was trying to perform.

This project also includes a library of examples using the language. The goals of the test cases are:

to provide a clearinghouse for unusual SVN history constructs
to provide a test suite for projects attempting to extract history from SVN repositories

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome, and should be sent either to Andrew Sayers <[email protected]> or to the Git mailing list <[email protected]>.

Authors are particularly encouraged to provide more examples for the library - everyone that works in this area discovers a different set of edge cases, and we can only hope to write better software by sharing knowledge about those edge cases.

The ideal way of contributing to the library is to provide a new test file, but just explaining a problem you had will often be enough.

Licensing

Since the goal of this project is to provide resources usable by everybody, the licenses used are:

Language.txt and README.txt: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The full license is available here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode A human-readable summary is available here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Everything else: MIT license - http://www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT

The MIT license is also accessible as MIT-LICENSE.txt in this directory.

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