Publishing Changes

Now that we have a working copy, we can edit the files as we like. One of the files in our sandbox is Combinatorics.java, so let's edit that and add some comments like good developers. But these edits aren't visible to anyone else until we commit them to the repository. To do that, we commit our changes:

$$\mbox{\texttt{svn commit}}$$

or, if we only want to commit changes to specific files:

$$\mbox{\texttt{svn commit files ...}}$$

For each commit, SVN requires a log message, which is a human-readable high-level description of the changes that you're committing to the repository. You can specify this on the command line, or you can configure SVN to open an editor where you can edit the log message. By default, SVN is configured to require the message on the command line. To have it bring up an editor, set the SVN_EDITOR environment variable to the name of the editor you want SVN to start. You can also do this by setting the editor-cmd setting in ~/.subversion/config, once that file has been created.