Re: .svn directories considered harmful :-).

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 03:11:30AM +0000, Thomas A. Horsley wrote:
> 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.

Worst case scenario if you do that is you move the wc dir. checkout a
copy at the same rev and then copy the files from your other version
back over.

But at the same time I'll point out that I've never accidentally deleted
a .svn dir.

The advantage of the .svn dirs is if you want to move a working copy
it's very straightforward, even between machines.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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