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 that 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!

熟悉CVS管理目录的人可能会发现，Subversion的.svn/entries实现了CVS的CVS/Entries、CVS/Root和CVS/Repository的功能。

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behavior in light of them), the need for easy developer debugging has diminished as Subversion has matured and has been replaced by the user's need for snappier performance.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.

如我们前面提到的，.svn也包含了一些原始的“text-base”文件版本，可以在.svn/text-base看到。这些原始文件的好处是多方面的—察看本地修改和区别不需要经过网络访问，减少传递修改时的数据—但是随之而来的代价是每个版本化的文件都在磁盘至少保存两次，现在看来这是对大多数文件可以忽略不计的一个惩罚。但是，当你版本控制的文件增多之后形势会变得很严峻，我们已经注意到了应该可以选择使用“text-base”，但是具有讽刺意味的是，当版本化文件增大时，“text-base”文件的存在会更加重要—谁会希望在提交一个小修改时在网络上传递一个大文件？

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.