Plugin developement and SVN

Question

I'm going to develop a plugin for WordPress. My environnement is all set up with a local wordpress installation and Aptana Studio. I also have my own subversion server.

I have now to determine how I'm going to use subversion. I see mainly two possibilities :

• Register my plugin at WordPress.org and use from the very beginning of my development the repository provided. Problem : to register, I need to give a link to my plugin, which doesn't exist yet.
• or, develop my plugin with my own repository on my own svn server. When the plugin is ready (or at least a working beta version), register it at WordPress.org. Problem : I would have two repositories : mine and the one provided by WordPress.org. How am I going to deal with these ?

Another question : no matter where the repository is (on my own server or on WordPress servers), where should I check it out ?

• Into my local wordpress installation, in the plugin folder : this means if I want to test it with several wordpress versions, I would have multiple check-ins. Advantage is that I can put the whole wordpress site into Aptana and take advantage of the autocompletion.
• Into another folder and symlink to this folder from my difference local wordpress installations. Disadvantage : I don't have autocompletion in Aptana.
• Or is there a better solutions ?

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Two things to note, URL requirement when registering plugin is currently worded as:

Plugin URL (required, must be a link to a ZIP file of the working plugin)

So you can simply put packed up plugin somewhere (your server, public Dropbox folder, etc) to provide it for review. It doesn't have to be established site or version control repository.

Second - it is highly not recommended to use WordPress org repositories for actual development, ideally you should only commit releases there.

There are number of different workflows to handle it, so it's individual choice - do some research around. Personally I do development in Mercurial and commit only releases to SVN (without doing any integration between two, they just set up to ignore each other).