[Prophesy] Background material - Subversion

[Daniel Phillips]

Subversion is a well-established and active project whose design is similar 
in many ways to what I've put forth:

   http://subversion.tigris.org/

The subversion code is hosted online in a Subversion repository.  This 
directory of design notes makes interesting reading:

   http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/branches/0.11.1/notes/

Subversion uses a database, currently Berkeley DB, with plans to switch to an 
SQL database at some point in the future.  Hmm.  I wonder, why not start 
there?

A repository is made available for distributed access via an Apache module, 
just as I'd planned.  The use of DAV gives a simple form of web browsing 
interface for free.  The Subversion engine is modeled on a filesystem, and 
seems headed in the direction of becoming a versioning filesystem, although 
the technical details of how to make it a mountable filesystem have not been 
addressed.  Instead, filesystem-like access is provided by way on a C api
modeled on the Posix file functions.

Much functionality appears to be available already, however, the file formats 
have not been frozen and database design issues seem to be in flux.

-- 
Daniel