Hi Guys!

You might have encountered a few "autoversioning commits" in the past. Autoversioning is an Apache SVN Feature, which allows standard WebDAV clients to edit content via WebDAV.

If you didn't use WebDAV in the past, don't worry, so didn't I. But it is a powerful protocol, which is supported by a wide range of tools. There is even support in Linux to mount such a folder. But this is a feature which I would not recommend to use in combination with autoversioning (later more on that).

Delta V

If you search for WebDAV and SVN, you will come across the term "Delta V client". The WebDAV protocol didn't define version handling. So it was only well usable when it was used in a similar way as a public network share, by only few people.

The RFC3253 has introduced versioning features to the WebDAV standard. Clients supporting this addition are called "Delta V clients".

SVN

SVN is using the WebDAV protocol as its HTTP/HTTPS based protocol. So an SVN client acts actually as a Delta V client. That's also the reason, why you can browse SVN repositories with a standard browser.

Autoversioning

The autoversioning feature is not specified in the protocol or even visible to the client. It is a feature, implemented by the apache webdav SVN module. It is very useful, as it gives you write access to an SVN repository with an ordinary WebDAV client, which doesn't know anything about versioning.

Use Cases

As mentioned above, WebDAV w/o versioning is only useful when you access it with only very few clients, as concurrent changes might not be detected, which can lead to loss of changes, done by one of the clients.

Using SVN as the back end improves this a bit, as no change is really lost. Everything can be recovered. But because you have no commit messages, the overview is not very good.

So still, you should only use it with a limited number of clients.

Android

A nice feature is, that you can change files on the run. You can use several WebDAV clients for Android. But the following combination is known to work well:

• Total Commander
• WebDAV PlugIn for Total Commander
• Droid Edit

Mounting

In Linux, there are drivers to mount a WebDAV directory as a local folder. So you can use all kinds of applications. There is no special support for WebDAV needes in the applications.

While this sounds promising at first sight, it has a very big drawback. You will end up witha very huge amount of unwanted, intermediate commits. So reverting things becomes nearly impossible. So when you use SVN like this, it has no real advantage over a publically shared folder anymore.