Cave Survey SVN repository

[Andrew]

I have had a short play with the repository and is seems to work. Well done Cooke.

http://british-caving.org.uk/svn/cave

Username and pw will have to be by pm.

My latest commitment to the repository (in the directory notes) is a document containing a thought dump of how the repositories might be used as an archive as well as a tool, with some rules for governing it. It is just a starting point for discussion, lots will be missing, somethings in there I do not agree with, but I have been listening to others over the past few years. Constructive comments on substance welcomed, it need polishing, but that can be done latter.

[David Cooke]

Thanks for the notes - seem sound to me.

There are some administrative details to sort out, which I post here for comment.

o The details above are for a test repository whilst input is gathered on how it is best structured.

o I propose the repositories would be better under the cave-registry.org.uk domain that BCA owns, rather than british-caving.org.uk

o Currently setting up new repositories requires shell access, so for the time being that's just me. A bit of work and some simple scripts should broaden that out.

o Creating new users is available to the domain webmaster using the cPanel. That is me and Les at the moment but I'm happy to have other webmasters once moved to the cave-registry domain.

o Access permissions to the repositories is done by a configuration file. Currently that again is just me, but I could easily set it up so that the repository owner could update that file via ftp.

o Do you envisage one big repository with separate projects in different directories or a separate repository per project or some other scheme?

[Andrew]

Yep, moving the domain when it is working sounds like a good plan.

As for the repository setups, I would leave this to the individual control of the 'owners'

I personally would allow the set up of different repositories, possibly with clubs individuals 'owning' more than one. For example UBSS are working on a few projects, two of which are Charterhouse area and Co.Claire. Although some personal overlap some people will only be interested in one of the areas.
My understanding of SVN is that if it is in one repository, although the access can be controlled, the version number goes up with every commit, so a commit to Co.Claire would increase the version number of Charterhouse without Charterhouse changing. With more repositories this would be worse, which I think people would find confusing, especially if you need to go back and find changes.
In addition the email notification of a change is very extremely useful, but you would not want to be notified of changes to repositories I do not have access to. Although this might be possible, the administration would be easier for the 'owner' if they are separate repositories.