"Thomas A. Horsley" <tom.horsley@att.net> writes:
> As a potential new user reading about subversion for the first time, I was
> immediately struck by what an incredibly bad idea the .svn directories seem
> to be. Wouldn't they be safer if I could do something like set an
> environment variable named (perhaps) SNV_ROOT and then have the .svn
> directories created under the SVN_ROOT directory tree instead of directly in
> my working copy?
>
> My work area is where I live all the time, where I fat finger commands,
> where I run perl scripts to automatically edit all the files in the
> directory tree, etc. With the .svn directories mixed in with my work area, I
> have to constantly be on guard. With them off in a separate parallel
> directory tree, I'm much less likely to do something stupid to them. Having
> the .svn directories in my work area seems a lot like logging in as root all
> the time :-).
>
> Just 2 cents from the first impressions of someone who knows nothing about
> subversion except what he read in the book the last couple of days.
There have been several expressions similar to yours in days gone by
-- the voices are being heard. But the decision to use in-tree .svn
areas was made for two main reasons:
1. Having in-tree admin areas means you can pick up and move a
working copy to a different location and preserve that admin
information. So if you do an 'svn checkout' to /some/path, and
then later decide you wish your working copy was elsewhere, you
just use 'mv /some/path /some/other/path' and that's that.
2. Users of CVS (who are, ultimately, our primary market) will be
familiar with this practice, as CVS uses in-tree admin areas.
I'm not saying the topic won't be revisited. I'm just saying the
decision wasn't made without thought.
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Received on Wed Feb 25 05:22:24 2004