a knotty story

How do I manage several different projects under Subversion?

It depends upon the projects involved. If the projects are related, and are likely to share data, then it's best to create one repository with several subdirectories like this:

	$ svnadmin create /repo/svn
	$ svn mkdir file:///repo/svn/projA
	$ svn mkdir file:///repo/svn/projB
	$ svn mkdir file:///repo/svn/projC

If the projects are completely unrelated, and not likely to share data between them, then it's probably best to create separate and unrelated repositories.

	$ mkdir /repo/svn
	$ svnadmin create /repo/svn/projA
	$ svnadmin create /repo/svn/projB
	$ svnadmin create /repo/svn/projC

The difference between these two approaches is this (as explained by Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@collab.net>):

• In the first case, code can easily be copied or moved around between projects, and the history is preserved. ('svn cp/mv' currently only works within a single repository.)
• Because revision numbers are repository-wide, a commit to any project in the first case causes a global revision bump. So it might seem a bit odd if somebody has 'projB' checked out, notices that 10 revisions have happened, but projB hasn't changed at all. Not a big deal, really. Just a little weird at first. This used to happen to svn everytime people committed to rapidsvn, when rapidsvn was in the same repository. :-)
• The second case might be easier to secure; it's easier to insulate projects from each other (in terms of users and permissions) using Apache's access control. In the 1st case, you'll need a fancy hook script in the repository that distinguishes projects ("is this user allowed to commit to this particular subdir?") Of course, we already have such a script, ready for you to use.