Checking out SVN

What is SVN?

Subversion is a framework or versioning control system used for Scribus. As such, it allows multiple developers to contribute to the Scribus source code simultaneously, and for our purposes here, allows anyone to keep up to date on the latest code with has been committed to the project. Check the Subversion page for further details on how to use this tool. On your computer, subversion is a program you must have to interact with the Scribus repository (the server where the source code is located). Therefore, you must have svn installed, and you must be connected to the internet for subversion to work. Most users, those not contributing to Scribus, will need only 2 commands, svn checkout, which has a short form of svn co, and svn update, which has a short form of svn up.

What is happening when you checkout the source code with svn co is that you are downloading all of the elements of the sourcecode, which is a large number of files split into a number of directories. Therefore, you should understand something about how directories and files are arranged on your computer. On the server, the top directory is Scribus, with all the files and subdirectories inside, and this structure is duplicated on your computer. Once you decide to update your source code, you need to be inside this Scribus directory, so that then you can run the svn up command. If you are not in that directory, updating will fail.

This table shows the specific commands to enter into a terminal. You have the option of calling your main directory whatever you like. In the first example, scribus15 is this main directory, and where you will go to update later. It's also worth mentioning that you can have more than one Scribus version that you download and compile, using separately, and of course, these source files need to be in separate directories.

Status	Version		SVN Path	Command to download from SVN
Development	1.7.x		/trunk/Scribus	svn co svn://scribus.net/trunk/Scribus scribustrunk
Stable	1.6.x		/branches/Version16x/Scribus	svn co svn://scribus.net/branches/Version16x/Scribus scribus16x
Experimental	1.5.x		/branches/Version15x/Scribus	svn co svn://scribus.net/branches/Version15x/Scribus scribus15x
Stable	1.4.x		/branches/Version14x/Scribus	svn co svn://scribus.net/branches/Version14x/Scribus scribus14x

Additional Notes:

• All subversion URLs for Scribus anonsvn are based at: svn://scribus.net/
• There's also http://scribus.net/svn/Scribus/ , which gets you to the same content, but svn://scribus.net/ is usually faster. HTTP access might be useful to those behind paranoid firewalls or proxies.
• When you might use a Development Snapshot would be in some situation where you know that the Development version has some major problems not yet fixed, but you know which revision (20099 in the example above) was safe to use.