Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 04-08-2006 Installation Manual page 731

40.1.3 Subversion
In contrast to CVS, which "evolved," Subversion (SVN) is a consistently designed
project. Subversion was developed as a technically improved successor to CVS.
Subversion has been improved in many respects to its predecessor. Due to its history,
CVS only maintains files and is oblivious of directories. Directories also have a version
history in Subversion and can be copied and renamed just like files. It is also possible
to add metadata to every file and to every directory. This metadata can be fully main-
tained with versioning. As opposed to CVS, Subversion supports transparent network
access over dedicated protocols, like WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and
Versioning). WebDAV extends the functionality of the HTTP protocol to allow collab-
orative write access to files on remote Web servers.
Subversion was largely assembled on the basis of existing software packages. Therefore,
the Apache Web server and the WebDAV extension always run in conjunction with
Subversion.
40.1.4 mailsync
Unlike the synchronization tools covered in the previous sections, mailsync only syn-
chronizes e-mails between mailboxes. The procedure can be applied to local mailbox
files as well as to mailboxes on an IMAP server.
Based on the message ID contained in the e-mail header, the individual messages are
either synchronized or deleted. Synchronization is possible between individual mailboxes
and between mailbox hierarchies.
40.1.5 rsync
When no version control is needed but large directory structures need to be synchronized
over slow network connections, the tool rsync offers well-developed mechanisms for
transmitting only changes within files. This not only concerns text files, but also binary
files. To detect the differences between files, rsync subdivides the files into blocks and
computes checksums over them.
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