This section is from the "Version Control with Subversion" book, by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato. Also available from Amazon: Version Control with Subversion.
At some point, you're going to need to understand how your
Subversion client communicates with its server. Subversion's
networking layer is abstracted, meaning that Subversion clients
exhibit the same general behaviors no matter what sort of server
they are operating against. Whether speaking the HTTP protocol
(http://
) with the Apache HTTP Server or
speaking the custom Subversion protocol
(svn://
) with svnserve,
the basic network model is the same. In this section, we'll
explain the basics of that network model, including how
Subversion manages authentication and authorization
matters.