Re: svn documentation

I had no idea you had been writing such an excellent piece of documentation!
Other projects would be proud to have such a handbook. A few comments:

* In section 3.5, you talk about writing a Perl script to crypt(3) passwords
for Apache's access control. I find it much easier to use the htpasswd
command that is installed in /path/to/apache/bin/htpasswd:

$ /path/to/apache/bin/htpasswd /path/to/passwd/file username
New password: [password]
Re-type new password: [password]
Adding password for user username

Hopefully this would be a little less intimidating to non-Perl users.

* Of course I personally know all about branches and tags (Section 2.4) and
their use-cases, since they are such an integral part of most version control
systems, but newbies may not. If you don't want to spend time reproducing
what many others have already written (or maybe this handbook is just not
aimed at total newbies?), please provide a pointer to the Cederqvist (sp?)
book or somewhere else that has a newbie-oriented explaination as to why/how
branches and tags should be used and managed in the first place.

* What happened to the 'http://foo/svn/.../@rev' syntax? Did that get
removed? I thought it was kind of nice :) In any case, an explaination of
how URL's work with Subversion (both http:// and file://), especially how the
left hand part specifies the path to the repository and the right hand part
is the node within the repository, but the division between the two is not
usually apparent. Maybe this is obvious.

On a related note, in your first example of using 'svnadmin create myrepos',
it isn't clear what exactly 'myrepos' is supposed to be. It is a directory
of course, but it might be helpful to show the example (and other examples
using 'myrepos') using a full path like '/path/to/myrepos', just to show that
myrepos is actually created as a directory on the disk, and is not just some
magical identifier. Also consider pointing out that '/path/to' has to exist
beforehand.

Hopefully none of the additions I request are too obvious. I'm trying to read
this as though I had never used Subversion or CVS before. Of course you
can't expect my grandmother to read this and know what to do, but maybe a
disclaimer at the top saying "The examples that follow require at least
minimal knowledge of a UNIX command line, blah blah... If you are using
Windows, remember to use '\' instead of '/' as path separators, blah
blah...".

Thanks!

-- 
Peter Davis
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org