Chapter 9. Organizing Your Repository

In Part III, you will learn the ins and outs of administering a Subversion repository. Mostly that means repository setup, because Subversion rarely requires much maintenance after the repository is up and running. In the simplest cases, even the front-end administration is trivialsimply create a new repository and add a few lines to your Apache config files to point them to the repository's location. Conversely, for large, complex repositories, or repositories with many users, setup can get fairly involved. If you put in the effort to use hook scripts to automate integration and policy support, setup can provide a full-time job to one or more people for a decent period of time.

The ease of moving files and directories around in a Subversion repository means that it's no longer necessary to spend countless hours arguing over exactly how the repository should be set up (knowing that changing it down the road will be practically impossible). Just because changing things is easy, though, doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the time to devise a good repository layout that will help support your project's workflow. In fact, with Subversion's flexible layout, you have a large number of options when laying out the repository, and a little thought into how to do so can go a long way. In this chapter, you will learn about many of the issues that you should consider when laying out your repository to support your overall workflow and to ease your project's growth over time. You will also learn how to migrate an existing repository from a CVS or Visual SourceSafe repository.