I’m a casual user of SVN, never tried Hg. I tend to agree with you. The more common way of people doing things is to start a project in their own machines and only when they think they have something worth keeping do they about creating a repository in SVN. So it’s almost certain that you’ll be repeating those old steps from the irritating new project dance. Bloody annoying if you ask me!

Cheers

Paulo

Yeah, I suppose a simple shell command could automate the process, but it should be part of SVN.

Giorgos,

SVN was my intro into version control, so conventions likee branches tags etc are still stuck with me, but I like the idea of “clone”. I’m glad I posted this, I end up learning more from comments

Note that having a toplevel “trunk” with “branches” and “tags” in the same level is an svn convention that has grown out of the way subversion represents different branches by different repository subdirectories.

You don’t really need those in Hg, because whenever you want to “fork” the tree and start heading in a slightly different direction (a branch), you can clone the original:

    % cd projects
    % hg clone foo-devel foo-1.0
    % cd foo-1.0
    % hack ; commit ; hack more ; commit more

You’ve probably noticed that graphical tools like Subclipse don’t have this problem. The Team -> Share Project menu item checks your project in and leaves you with a working copy. The svn team should have included a command to do this too.

I asked Mark Phippard about this and the sequence of commands that Subclipse uses to do a check in and get a working copy is below. These are from some old notes of mine, so be sure to back up your project before trying this in case I made an error.

svn mkdir -m “Add new project dir to repos” newprojectdirinrepos_url

cd new_project

ls -a // shows no .svn directory

// now check out the empty repository directory into your project svn co newprojectdirinrepos_url .

ls -a // now shows a .svn dir

svn add –force .

svn ci -m “Initial import”

I don’t know why the last step is a check-in instead of a commit.

I also don’t know why the svn FAQ and svn Redbook don’t include this. It would save a lot of aggravation.