Installing an SVN repository -- permissions, and general tactics?

[Tom <tom@abwaerts.be>]

Hey ho,

With a couple fellow students, I have a small school project going, and
we thought a repository might be a nice way of managing what little and
slow progress we're making at this point. It'd be nice to be able to use
the repo fully by the time it will be useful.

For a while, I've considered darcs, but we didn't really get along. SVN
seemed a little overkill for what it will be used for, initially, but
from reading the docs, I think it will manage downward scalability just
fine... :-)

About to set things up, and after reading the SVN book, I'm left with
some questions still. The book itself barely mentions permissions, and
when it does (at the end of chapter 6), it suggests I create a new group
(called "svn"), and add those users to it that will need to access the
repository. In this case, that'd be myself (I'd prefer using file:///
URLs) and www-data (since Debian provides libapache2-svn, it'd be a
shame not to make use of it). I'd also have to wrap the svn binary in a
script changing the umask to 002. For the same reason, I'd have to
modify apachectl.

Is that the really the smoothest way to go? It seems a little cluttered
and nothing like the proverbial "Debian way". Do people here run SVN
repositories? How did you go about those permissions?

A slightly related thing I wondered about is where I should put the
repository. Is there a conventional place, or should I pick whatever
location I fancy?

Thanks in advance for any tips,
Tom

-- 
"Es bückt sich der Mann, um durch das Tor in das Innere zu sehen."
 ---                                (Franz Kafka, Vor dem Gesetz)
np: Pardoen - De May - Mutatis Mutandis