Best practice for project directory structure and source control

Question

I am trying to come up with a canonical way to structure my source code projects. I use JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and Subversion (1.6.12) (using SmartSVN as my GUI).

I have created a source directory structure like this:

project
  + trunk
  + branches
  + tags

and open a new IDEA project in the trunk directory. I write some code :-).

I am now going to add the project to a new repository I created on the SVN server (svnadmin create myproject). I am using SmartSVN 6.6.2.

In SmartSVN I tell it to import the code into a new project and point it at my repository using SVN+SSH. SmartSVN warns me that I am importing a directory other than the customary trunk because I gave it the top-level project directory. I am confused. Shouldn't I import the whole directory structure into SVN?

Thanks.

Answer 1

When using the standard Subversion directory structure, you don't usually have all of trunk, branches and tags checked out on your machine, because that will give you many, many copies of the same files on your system, once you have multiple tags or branches. Instead, you usually just have trunk checked out, and may later switch your checkout to point to a branch or tag, or check out a branch or tag you are interested in in a separate directory, if you need to work on them.

I haven't used SmartSVN before, but it sounds like it expects to be given just the trunk directory when creating a new project, because it expects that you will only have that checked out. It is perfectly correct to have the directory structure you describe on the server, it just isn't expecting to get that for the import. Note that if you have already created anything in the tags or branches folders on the client, Subversion won't know how how they relate to the trunk, and will thus just treat them as entirely separate files. But if those directories are empty upon import, you should be just fine, it's just warning you that you were importing the code in a slightly unexpected way.

Answer 2

You should create the trunk/tags/branches structure on the server, not at the client. The first checkin you make will go to trunk.

You want to be able to check out from <server>/svn/repos/project/trunk.

Also, don't create a new repository for each new project, to enable re-use of code.