any thoughts?

The issue of where to place build directories is interesting, but specifying someplace else can have its own dangers. On another system or for another user, writing to an arbitrary path outside the project directory or the working copy can have unintentional effects, including permissions issues, overwritten files, or just not knowing where to find built products. Whether I’m working with Xcode, Ant, or another language/build system, I always opt to svn:ignore the build directory. Most developers expect this approach.

Re: .pbxuser files… You can go either way, but even if I’m the only one using a repository, it still exclude them. I found that the per-user Xcode files changed frequently enough that unless one is careful, a commit can easily include changes unrelated to the code modification, and tend to gunk up the history when examining logs and diffs. (Even an Xcode-file-only commit is unrelated to the project at hand and tends to be a distraction more than anything.) YMMV, but I tend to use Transmit and the Synchronize feature if I really need to keep per-user Xcode files synchronized. Most of the time, I don’t bother — the “if” in Apple’s guidance is a big one, and most of the time I don’t care to preserve my personal settings (which includes position and size of every open window), particularly when going between a 15″ laptop and a 24″ cinema display. :-)

The nice thing is that even if you set svn:ignore for a resource, you can still `svn add` the ignored resource to your repository. Subversion just avoids bothering the user about such files, so it becomes opt-in. It may be tempting to say this isn’t a Subversion problem, but regardless of the version control system one uses, there are perennial issues like this, and IMHO, any SCM tool worth its salt should have some mechanism for dealing with it.

Also, according to Apple docs re: .pbxuser files
“You should include your user file in your commits and updates if you want to safeguard your personal settings for the project in the repository or if you work on the project on more than one computer and want to use the same settings on all of them.”

Wholesale ignoring of these files could have side effects for some, depending on their development workflow.

If you want to apply properties to files already in a repository, check out svn_apply_autoprops.py — just run it in a working copy and everything down the hierarchy will be affected. You can modify/revert files as desired before committing.

(1) In step 4, why bother to set the mime type for the first 3 types, since they’re already ignored by SVN?

(2) Where did you get the MIME type text/X-xcode from? I can’t find it documented anywhere, and I doubt that either svnserve or Apache will do anything intelligent with it. I use text/plain for *.pbxproj files.

Thanks!