Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 04-08-2006 Installation Manual page 733

40.2.4 Conflicts: Incidence and Solution
Conflicts only rarely occur in Subversion or CVS, even when several people work on
one large program project. This is because the documents are merged on the basis of
individual lines. When a conflict occurs, only one client is affected. Usually conflicts
in Subversion or CVS can easily be resolved.
Unison reports conflicts, allowing the affected files to be excluded from the synchro-
nization. However, changes cannot be merged as easily as in Subversion or CVS.
As opposed to Subversion or CVS, where it is possible to partially accept changes in
cases of conflict, WebDAV only performs a check-in when the complete modification
is considered successful.
There is no conflict handling in rsync. The user is responsible for not accidentally
overwriting files and manually resolving all possible conflicts. To be on safe side, a
versioning system like RCS can be additionally employed.
40.2.5 Selecting and Adding Files
In its standard configuration, Unison synchronizes an entire directory tree. New files
appearing in the tree are automatically included in the synchronization.
In Subversion or CVS, new directories and files must be added explicitly using the
command svn add or cvs add, respectively. This results in greater user control over
the files to synchronize. On the other hand, new files are often overlooked, especially
when the question marks in the output of svn update and svn status or
cvs update are ignored due to the large number of files.
40.2.6 History
An additional feature of Subversion or CVS is that old file versions can be reconstructed.
A brief editing remark can be inserted for each change and the development of the files
can easily be traced later based on the content and the remarks. This is a valuable aid
for theses and program texts.
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