Question

I’m trying to create and follow best practices for versioning control and came across a reference to atomic commits in Subversion. Since I’ve never heard of this action, I have a few questions about it.

• What’s its purpose?
• When should it be used?
• How is it different than a normal commit?
• Is it available to TortoiseSVN users? If so, how?

Answer 1

There is no special command for atomic commits. Every commit in Subversion is atomic.

It means every commit (of any number of files) will either succeed or fail as a whole.
It’s not possible that only some of the commited files make it to the repository and others not (for example, because of an error that occurred in the middle of the commit operation or a conflict in one of the files).

This is the same for TortoiseSVN, since it builds on the “normal” Subversion functionality.

---

The following is an excerpt from the Subversion book:

An svn commit operation publishes
changes to any number of files and
directories as a single atomic
transaction. In your working copy, you
can change files’ contents; create,
delete, rename, and copy files and
directories; and then commit a
complete set of changes as an atomic
transaction.

By atomic transaction, we mean simply
this: either all of the changes happen
in the repository, or none of them
happens. Subversion tries to retain
this atomicity in the face of program
crashes, system crashes, network
problems, and other users’ actions.