The svnsync program, which is new to the 1.4 release of Subversion, provides all the functionality required for maintaining a read-only mirror of a Subversion repository. The program really has one job—to transfer one repository's versioned history into another repository. And while there are few ways to do that, its primary strength is that it can operate remotely—the “source” and “sink” ^[31] repositories may be on different computers from each other and from svnsync itself.

As you might expect, svnsync has a syntax that looks very much like every other program we've mentioned in this chapter:

$ svnsync help
general usage: svnsync SUBCOMMAND DEST_URL  [ARGS & OPTIONS ...]
Type 'svnsync help <subcommand>' for help on a specific subcommand.
Type 'svnsync --version' to see the program version and RA modules.

Available subcommands:
   initialize (init)
   synchronize (sync)
   copy-revprops
   help (?, h)
$

We talk more about replication repositories with svnsync in the section called “Repository Replication”.