I just recently started getting familiar with svn and while it seems pretty straightforward for “normal” code development, it leaves me a bit confused about web development.
Web development requires a web server directly interacting with the source in order to test the (often small and very frequent) changes, so I guess the project’s document root should be a working copy. But every user is supposed to have his or her own working copy to be merged and committed to the repository, and later exported. This whole cycle is clearly not doable when you have to tweak a style sheet over and over again to satisfy all browsers.
Users clearly can’t work on the same working copy (that’s the point of svn) and you can’t checkout different working copies in the document root for path reasons, so what’s the best way to work with svn and web app development? Should every user have a webserver/php interpreter on the client machine?
I have always done it where each user has there own webserver/php interpreter, although all you need is your own apachectl that passes the user’s specific httpd.conf. Then each user needs their own httpd.conf. So all you need to replicate is the httpd.conf and apachectl, everyone can share the same apache installation.