SVN organization for a 3rd-party component

Question

Hi,

We are a small company which develops components for the Joomla! CMS. In the Joomla!'s jargon, a component is a small application that extends the CMS features (we are for example editing a directory component).

As a classical framework, Joomla has a pre-defined files structure which looks like this one:

|-- administrator/
|   |-- backups/
|   |-- cache/
|   |-- components/  <- here
|   |-- help/
|   |-- images/
|   |-- includes/
|   |-- language/
|   |   `-- en-GB/   <- here
|   |-- modules/
|   `-- templates/
|-- cache/
|-- components/      <- here
|-- images/
|-- includes/
|-- language/
|   `-- en-GB/       <- here
|-- libraries/
|-- logs/
|-- media/           <- here
|-- modules/         <- here
|-- plugins/         <- here
|-- templates/
|-- tmp/
|-- xmlrpc/

and our components is taking place in different directories marked with 'here'. To summup, we've got:

• a back-end interface
• a front-end interface
• language files (for back and front)
• media files (images, JS script, CSS...)
• modules
• plugins

We use SVN as version control system, but we are hesitating on the "best" way to organize our repository:

• should we mimic the Joomla's files structure, for example create a administrator/components/ to hold our back-end folder or just set a back/ folder
• should we separate modules and plugins from the component's trunk?

What is your opinion about setting a repository for a software which should sit on an already predefined files structure? What is the "best" strategy for this?

Thank you

Answer 1

I would mimic Joomla's structure so that installing the component is a simple matter of merging your tree with the Joomla tree, but really that is a matter of personal preference. As long as you have a simple install procedure (e.g. "sudo make install" or "sudo python setup.py install" or the like), I don't think it matters.