Ah yes, thats a cleaner way to do what I had given in the "initial setup" section.
Typically, what happens is that the user/programmer will get a working copy (or update his working copy) from the repo., make changes to his local copy (working copy) of the files and subsequently commit his changes back to the repo.
the first time the user does a checkout, a .svn dir. is automatically created in his working copy. This dir. is required for svn to work. But in our case we are starting with an empty repo. so there is nothing to checkout and adding files from /etc to the repo doesn't automatically make /etc a working copy (ie. no .svn is created). so the problem was how to make /etc a working copy. (Or atleast thats my understanding of it.
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