When you are working with complex projects in a team, it may be extremely hard to grasp the impact of your changes in relation to the changes committed by others. To help with this, the Eclipse IDE offers the Team Synchronizing Perspective, which the SVN plug-in for Eclipse extends to support SVN repositories. To activate this perspective, choose Window > Open Perspective > Other... and select Team Synchronizing. Alternatively, you can launch the persective directly from your working copy via the Team > Synchronize... context menu option.
The concept of team synchronization is that of a cross-resource, three way merge in which you may consider all changes at once, and filter the information as needed before performing any updates or commits, with your existing working copy being the focal point. Your own local changes are called outgoing and the changes that have happened in the repository since your last update are called incoming. In the synchronization perspective, both incoming and outgoing changes are analyzed before they are synchronized; that is, for incoming changes, synchronization means that your working copy is updated (corresponds to Team > Update) and for outgoing changes, synchronization means that your changes are committed.
Launching the Team Synchronization Perspective does not update or change the status of local or repository resources automatically.
The Team Synchronizing Perspective as a whole can be considered analogous to the output of svn status -u.
The Team Synchronization Perspective is a function of the Eclipse IDE. For a more detailed discussion of team synchronization, take a look at the help on CVS workspace synchronization.