TeX Live and Subversion

TeX Live uses the Subversion system for source control, to support development by many people simultaneously. Subversion must be used to commit changes, but is not needed (or recommended) simply for read-only access to the development sources.

So, for TL developers (wanting to commit changes):

• Initial developer setup for TeX Live.
• Basic Subversion usage.

For public (read-only) access:

• You can browse the repository via the web; this always reflects the current state of the repository. (Footnote: the ls-R and texlive.tlpdb files are excluded from browsing, since they are updated at least daily and generating their history for robots, etc., is a big load on the server. Use rsync or svn to view these files.)

• You can retrieve the entire development source tree via rsync:
  rsync -a --delete --exclude=.svn tug.org::tldevsrc .
  This command will copy the repository contents to the current directory; the . can be replaced with any directory, as usual. If you leave off the ., it will list the (many) files that would be copied. Once you have the files, another rsync with the same arguments will keep you updated. The master tree is updated hourly.

• If you only want to retrieve the compilable sources, as opposed to all the support files as well, replace tldevsrc in the above with tldevsrc/Build/source, and see the separate TeX Live build page.

• You can retrieve the actual Subversion database files via rsync:
  rsync -a --delete tug.org::tldevrepo .
  Naturally, this requires much more disk space than the previous option (~5gb and counting), but it is the most efficient way of getting all the history.

• Anonymous Subversion access is supported:
  svn co svn://tug.org/texlive/trunk
  Replace co with list to test the connection. Notice that's an svn: url, not http:.

Final tip: if you want to use Subversion checkouts but want to exclude some directories, such as Master/bin/arch for the architectures you don't use, you can avoid ever doing an update or checkout from the bin, Master, or top-level directories, or use the Subversion 1.5 sparse checkout feature.