Why Subversion?

Subversion is a relatively new versioning system, designed as a replacement of CVS. Its features include:

• Atomic commits
• The file Rename/Move/Copy actions preserve the revision history
• The directories are versioned
• Native support for binary files
• Optimized repository access
• File properties and MIME types
• Multiple repository access protocols including HTTP and HTTPS.

Subversion is a good choice for sharing/storing large collections of XML files that change frequently. Subversion stores the differences between revisions in an efficient database and minimizes the network load footprint - only the differences are sent between the SVN client and the server.