I wanted to add a project to Subversion, but I wanted to ignore some of the directories in the project directory.  The standard way to do this would be to add the whole project directory and then set the svn:ignore property to ignore the directories, and then delete them from the repository.  But that adds the directories to svn, and delete doesn't really delete, so I wanted better.

• Your repository URL is file:///tmp/foo-repo [1]
• Your project directory is project1.
• Your current working directory is project1.

• svn mkdir -m "Adding just the project1 directory."  -m file:///tmp/foo-repo/project1 [2]
• svn co file:///tmp/foo-repo/project1 [3] .
• Don't miss that trailing period!
• Here you have two choices.  
• If you want to ignore the directories completely:
• Add the directory names to "svnignores.txt"
• svn propset svn:ignore -F svnignores.txt .
• If you want to ignore the CONTENT of the directories (i.e. to check-in the directories and keep the directory empty in the repository):
• svn propset svn:ignore '*' directoryName1
• svn propset svn:ignore '*' directoryName2
• svn add *
• svn commit -m "Adding the contents of the project1 directory."