[rfc]Checkout without the .svn Directories

Hi,

        Firstly let me apologise if this has been asked before, please point me
at the correct pleace to see the old discussion if it has.

Am I correct in thinking that with all the .svn directories, a
directory tree will take up twice as much space as the directory tree
without the .svns would take? If not the rest of this is useless babble!

Now. I have one or two repo's which are checked out to specific place,
and never modified from there. I.e. the only actions ever taken are "svn
co..." and "svn up".

A good example of this is our intranet. It is accessable from two
places, and modified by me, on my own destop. I only need the .svn
directories on my desktop, as this is the only place I modify files.

What I would like, is a cammand such as "svn export ..." syntacticly
identical to svn checkout. The difference being, there would only be 1
.svn directory.

This would be in the top level, and would contain 1 file, which contains
the revision number. That's it, nothing else.

the "svn" command could then be modified to check if the current tree
was checked out or exported, and if exported, only allow svn up.

Is this feasable?