Chapter 3. The Working Copy

Table of Contents
3.1. Documentation and Manual Pages
3.2. Choosing a Mirror
3.3. Choosing a Directory
3.4. Checking Out a Copy
3.5. Updating a Working Copy
3.6. Reverting Changes
3.7. Making a Diff
3.8. Subversion References

The working copy is a copy of the FreeBSD repository documentation tree downloaded onto the local computer. Changes are made to the local working copy, tested, and then submitted as patches to be committed to the main repository.

A full copy of the documentation tree can occupy 700 megabytes of disk space. Allow for a full gigabyte of space to have room for temporary files and test versions of various output formats.

Subversion is used to manage the FreeBSD documentation files. It is installed by textproc/docproj as one of the required applications.

3.1. Documentation and Manual Pages

FreeBSD documentation is not just books and articles. Manual pages for all the commands and configuration files are also part of the documentation, and part of the FDP's territory. Two repositories are involved: doc for the books and articles, and base for the operating system and manual pages. To edit manual pages, the base repository must be checked out separately.

Repositories may contain multiple versions of documentation and source code. New modifications are almost always made only to the latest version, called head.

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/

Questions that are not answered by the documentation may be sent to <[email protected]>.
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