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Re: one more example of unclear terminology in SVN book

From: Ryan Schmidt <subversion-2004_at_ryandesign.com>
Date: 2004-12-20 14:07:56 CET

On 19. Dez 2004, at 18:16, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> on p. 23 (PDF version), section "Initial Checkout", here's a perfect
> example of vague terminology:
>
> "Most of the time, you will start using a Subversion repository by
> doing a checkout of your project. Checking out a repository creates a
> copy of it on your local machine. This copy contains the HEAD (latest
> revision) of the Subversion repository that you specify on the command
> line:
>
> $ svn checkout http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk"
>
> in the space of just a few lines, there are at least two thoroughly
> confusing uses of terminology.
>
> first, are we doing a "checkout of your project" or are we "Checking
> out a repository"? does a repo contain one project, or possibly
> multiple projects?

I agree that here, two words which mean different things ("repository"
and "project") are used as if they are interchangeable, and that this
is particularly confusing for someone like me, coming to SVN with no
previous background in version control. I'd appreciate very clear and
deliberate use of terms in the documentation to solidify my
understanding of them.

Perhaps it's also a bit confusing for the newcomer that the SVN book
here uses "svn" as the name of an example project. When I set up my
repository, it might not come as too much of a surprise that I named
the directory "svn" so now when I read such examples it takes me a
minute to figure out that "svn" in the example is not the repository
but a project within it. It would have reduced my confusion if a name
like "sampleproject" had been used. I realize that this specific
example was probably trying to give a real working example, so I'm not
sure how to meet that goal and also implement my suggestion.

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Received on Mon Dec 20 14:10:39 2004

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