XAMPP and Subversion

[donparadox]

I'm a total Mac and terminal newbie, be warned. I need some advice on which part of the manual to RTF ('read the fink') out of.

XAMPP is on my machine and working great. I've tested php pages in both my root localhost directory and my user sites directory, and all works as planned.

I've also installed Subversion, because managing project versions sounds like a great idea in theory. In practice I'm coming up against all kinds of roadblocks.

I found a good tutorial on the process of setting up Subversion on a mac here http://www.rubyrobot.org/tutorial/subversion-with-mac-os-x, but it isn't working for me. The first hurdle was this:

export PATH=/opt/subversion/bin/:$PATH

I.e., setting up the path. I have no idea how paths work on a Mac, I know how they work on Windows and figure that things are pretty similar. After chucking around a bit I figured out how to get this path into my 'bash' paths (first had to figure out what bash was, I'm that bad.)

So I've done this. But the next step was setting up a subversion repository. I'll just cut &paste my failed attempts here:

Dons-MacBook-Pro-2:etc Don$ svnadmin create SVNrep
svnadmin: Repository creation failed
svnadmin: Could not create top-level directory
svnadmin: Can't create directory 'SVNrep': Permission denied
Dons-MacBook-Pro-2:etc Don$ svnadmin create BITS2010/SVNrep
svnadmin: Repository creation failed
svnadmin: Could not create top-level directory
svnadmin: Can't create directory 'htdocs/CREATEDFOLDERWITHEASIERPERMISSIONS/SVNrep': No such file or directory
Dons-MacBook-Pro-2:etc Don$

...How do I get permission to do this for that directory?? I'm guessing that it's the directory that Xampp set up in the applications folder for htdocs, since I've already had permissions issues with it. I wasn't able to create folders using Finder either. I worked around it by creating a folder elsewhere and then dragging it into htdocs, but that trick isn't helping me get an SVNrep folder working.

What do I try next?