How should I organize source control for framework-based projects?

Question

I'm struggling trying to sort out what the best-practice is for putting a project under source control when the project is written against a framework. In my situation I will be using Mercurial for source control.

Most PHP frameworks have an 'application' folder where I'm supposed to put my code that interacts with the framework. So is it best to put the application folder into it's own repository and then have another repository for the framework files? Or is it better to put everything, including the framework, into a single repository?

I'd like to be able to have a decent amount of flexibility, namely I'd like to be able to swap out the version of the framework I'm using for experimentation while still being able to publish changes using the stable version.

I have experience with both the Kohana and Zend Framework frameworks so if you could use those as references that would be fantastic.

Answer 1

Well i dont use Mecrucial but perhaps my typical set up with Subversion will apply after you translate it :) I dont use a local centralized installation. I fnd that more often than not ill be using a specific version for each application i work on given the fast releas cycles of frameworks. So i always embed them within a project.

For Zend:

svn/path/
  trunk/
    application/
    library/
      Zend/  
      MyNamespace/
    public/
    data/

I use an svn:external to the version of the framework i want.... for example: http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/tags/release-1.10.5/library/Zend

For Symfony its much the same using externals for both symfony and any plugins. the difference is libraries like symfony and Zend i would put in a vendor directory instead of directly in lib:

svn/path/
  trunk/
    apps
    lib/
      vendor/
        Zend/  
        symfony/
    plugins/
    web/
    config/
    data/
    cache/
    log/

Answer 2

On my Kohana projects using git, I set up the entire project as a repository. This includes the application folder as well as modules and system. The system folder is a submodule pointing back to Kohana's latest stable. The modules can be normal files in the repo or they can be submodules as well. I also have a folder for the public_html files.

You can see how one company has it set up here: http://github.com/synapsestudios/kohana-projecttemplate

For development, you can make a new branch of your project and check out whichever version of system or module files you need to test with.