The concept of a recursive commit in SVN

Question

My office is kinda hooked up on SVN and I'm used to git. However I can do nothing about it, but to adapt.

I noticed there are two different concepts in SVN: recursive add and recursive commit. What is the difference really? Using RapidSVN I performed recursive add on my repo and then in commit dialog I see the following option:

Note the unselected by default Recursive option. Nevermind the absence of any added files and such, it's just for the demonstration purposes. How is this recursive commit different from recursive add? What's the point?

PS: Why downvoting? I come from git background and there is no such thing as recursive commit in Git. Google search turned up nothing. I'm really puzzled at how this thing works.

Answer 1

svn commit and svn add on the command line both have a flag "--non-recursive" which makes the commit only work on the current directory, and not on directories below. Reading this [1] thread I assume that this checkbox just uses these flags. When the checkbox is unchecked, the --non-recursive flag is used [2].

Having this checkbox default off seems weird to me.

1. http://tigris-scm.10930.n7.nabble.com/Issue-706-New-Cannot-commit-a-deleted-directory-td81162.html
2. http://solitarygeek.com/linux/subversion-and-rapidsvn