Perhaps the single most important file in the .svn directory is the entries file. It contains the bulk of the administrative information about the versioned items in a working copy directory. It is this one file which tracks the repository URLs, pristine revision, file checksums, pristine text and property timestamps, scheduling and conflict state information, last-known commit information (author, revision, timestamp), local copy history–practically everything that a Subversion client is interested in knowing about a versioned (or to-be-versioned) resource!

Folks familiar with CVS's administrative directories will have recognized at this point that Subversion's .svn/entries file serves the purposes of, among other things, CVS's CVS/Entries, CVS/Root, and CVS/Repository files combined.

The format of the .svn/entries file has changed over time. Originally an XML file, it now uses a custom–though still human-readable–file format. While XML was a great choice for early developers of Subversion who were frequently debugging the file's contents (and Subversion's behavior in light of them), the need for easy developer debugging has diminished as Subversion has matured, and has been replaced by the user's need for snappier performance. Be aware that Subversion's working copy library automatically upgrades working copies from one format to another–it reads the old formats, and writes the new–which saves you the hassle of checking out a new working copy, but can also complicate situations where different versions of Subversion might be trying to use the same working copy.

As mentioned before, the .svn directory also holds the pristine “text-base” versions of files. Those can be found in .svn/text-base. The benefits of these pristine copies are multiple–network-free checks for local modifications and difference reporting, network-free reversion of modified or missing files, more efficient transmission of changes to the server–but comes at the cost of having each versioned file stored at least twice on disk. These days, this seems to be a negligible penalty for most files. However, the situation gets uglier as the size of your versioned files grows. Some attention is being given to making the presence of the “text-base” an option. Ironically though, it is as your versioned files' sizes get larger that the existence of the “text-base” becomes more crucial–who wants to transmit a huge file across a network just because they want to commit a tiny change to it?

Similar in purpose to the “text-base” files are the property files and their pristine “prop-base” copies, located in .svn/props and .svn/prop-base respectively. Since directories can have properties, too, there are also .svn/dir-props and .svn/dir-prop-base files.