Subversion terminology. Difference between projects, modules and root directories

Question

I'm setting up a repository for me and some colleagues.

I have a subversion repository at hand, and all required rights. The usual directory-skeleton has been set up for me (branches, tags and trunk).

Now I'm about to create a directory for me and my colleagues to put our files in. I'm quite sure the right place to put it is in trunk.

Now here and there in tutorials, I see terms like "modules" and "projects" such as in

Checking Out a Project - svn checkout

svn checkout http://host_name/svn_dir/repository_name/project/trunk proj

Is proj in the above line some glorified directory in trunk? Should I do something else than a checkout on trunk, mkdir and then commit when creating a directory for me and my colleagues?

Whats the difference between a project, a directory in trunk and a module?

Answer 1

`svn checkout http://host_name/svn_dir/repository_name/project/trunk proj`

Is proj in the above line some glorified directory in trunk?

No, it's a top-level directory in the repository, which has tags, branches, and trunk as sub-directories. It's checked out to a local folder ./proj. Presumably, whoever wrote this prefers not to check out tags, branches, and trunk folders, but to svn switch their checkout between them instead.

Answer 2

In the above command "proj" is simply the local directory (path) where the specified content will be checked out to.

See the output of "svn help checkout" for more information.

You may find it useful to read a book such as http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ (Version Control with Subversion, available under an Open license).

There are many ways to setup a subversion server. In some cases, a single repository will contain multiple projects (perhaps the projects are very related - such as libraries which are dependencies of the primary product). For example:

+ repository
    + project_1
    + project_2
    + project_3

I'd need to see some context to help you with the "modules" term, but it's likely just similar - where a project is split into multiple modules (for example, libraries).