Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Strategies for Repository Deployment

Due largely to the simplicity of the overall design of the Subversion repository and the technologies on which it relies, creating and configuring a repository are fairly straightforward tasks. There are a few preliminary decisions you’ll want to make, but the actual work involved in any given setup of a Subversion repository is pretty basic, tending toward mindless repetition if you find yourself setting up multiples of these things.

Some things you’ll want to consider beforehand, though, are:

• What data do you expect to live in your repository (or repositories), and how will that data be organized?

• Where will your repository live, and how will it be accessed?

• What types of access control and repository event reporting do you need?

• Which of the available types of data store do you want to use?

In this section, we’ll try to help you answer those questions.

Planning Your Repository Organization

While Subversion allows you to move around versioned files and directories without any loss of information—and even provides ways of moving whole sets of versioned history from one repository to another—doing so can greatly disrupt the workflow of those who access the repository often and come to expect things to be at certain locations. So before creating a new repository, try to peer into the future a bit; plan ahead before placing your data under version control. By conscientiously “laying out” your repository or repositories and their versioned contents ahead ...