subversion inplace checkin

From the Subversion FAQ:
http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#in-place-import

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to put some of /etc under version control inside your repository:

# svn mkdir file:///root/svn-repository/etc -m "Make a directory in the repository to correspond to /etc"
# cd /etc
# svn checkout file:///root/svn-repository/etc .
# svn add apache samba alsa X11
# svn commit -m "Initial version of my config files"

This takes advantage of a not-immediately-obvious feature of svn checkout: you can check out a directory from the repository directly into an existing directory. Here, we first make a new empty directory in the repository, and then check it out into /etc, transforming /etc into a working copy. Once that is done, you can use normal svn add commands to select files and subtrees to add to the repository.

There is an issue filed for enhancing svn import to be able to convert the imported tree to a working copy automatically; see issue 1328.

note on using rapid svn i found that using file:/// is better than file:// !