Dan’s Drivelings

I use Subversion for my source code management needs. Every project that I work on gets put into my Subversion account at my hosting provider even if I’m the only one that will ever work on it. Using Subversion has saved me from significant loss of work on a number of occasions, so there’s no way that I’d consider not using it. I’m considering bringing my Subversion hosting in-house to a VPS that I control and have been thinking about how I want to organize my repository.

I’ve seen two different methods of organizing the repository–having a separate repository for each project, and having one, master repository with separate directory for each project. I can see advantages and disadvantages for each. Separate repositories allow individual access controls and maps directly one to one with Trac projects. One consolidated repository makes administration easier by putting everything under one repository.

So, my question to you folks, is what organization method do you prefer and why? If you’d like to share your opinions, success/failure stories or other relevant info, please feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks in advance for your input.

I recently decided to outsource my souce code management to CVSDude. I had been running SVN on my VPS that I have at Slicehost and that had been running okay.  However, I’m only good enough at SVN administration to get the server up and running and create a few repositories and there were other things that I needed to do with SVN that I frankly didn’t have time to learn how to do.

One of the things that I’d heard talked about that made life much easier was using Subversion’s various hooks to automate some things around different SVN events.  I emailed tech support asking how we could configure the “post-commit” hook to update the files on my VPS each time I made a commit into the SVN module.  The tech told me that they do this by configuring an HTTP call to a page (or script etc) on your server.  That page then triggers an SVN update of the specific module. 

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