Agaric's ideal Version Control system

An SVN system to work locally in concert with Drupal CVS to make test sites and maintaining custom modules really easy.

• Drupal core and contributed modules are kept up to date in example_test with cvs update (easy when the site has been set up with shell commands)
• We run our own SVN repository for projects: our custom themes and modules. We check out these themes and modules to example_test/sites/example_test.com/themes and example_test/sites/example_test.com/modules, respectively.
• Bonus: a quick way to copy a database, so that we can move example_db into example_test_db easily to run the test site on real data.
• After we know it works, the code from example _test (which combines Drupal CVS checkout with our own SVN checkout) is moved wholesale to /example, the live site (even call it /example_live to be really clear on that). Or, better, this is moved over with SVN so only the parts that changed are updated?

If that process is easy enough we might as well have each site have its own codebase. Alternatively we could have test and live codebases, put our custom modules in test (and live) /sites/all/modules -- and most of the time only sites/example.com/themes will be moved over to the live site.

We're in good shape for testing configuration as long as we can easily copy the live db for test purposes -- maybe even use "include database_settings.php" or conditional logic so we can move settings.php also, unchanged.