Total noob question but...

[Prysm]

what the hell is SVN?

[Ocean]

5186, 4771, 6063, etc... Are subversions of dolphin (svn).

2.0 is an official version branched off a svn created by devs.

[neobrain]

Uhm... actually 5186, 4771, 6063 etc are _revisions_ of the subversion (svn) repository of Dolphin.

Think of a repository as a huge database of all changes which have ever been made to a software project. i.e. if you want to change something, you commit a patch and create a new revision. so a revision is just a changeset with a number (which is increased by one with each changeset) and corresponding title.

There are various projects to create and manage such project repositories, for example git, subversion (svn), mercurial, ... All of them have different features, different advantages or disadvantages. For Dolphin, we're using subversion.
On top of that, there are several front-ends to these so called version control systems, like TortoiseSVN. These provide a graphical user interface to the functionality of the version control systems (otherwise you'd always need to use command line interfaces and stuff).

[Prysm]

aditional question, i got all the stuff instaled but when i went to create the file as the instrcutions say the source dl fails at a given point and when i try to open the dolphin.sin file it says several of the projects fail to load....what gives?