svn:externals feature(s)

[William Lentz <Wi...@Trimble.com>]

Hi,

It seems like svn:externals could be made more user-friendly for
svn:externals refering to the same repository.

How about if svn:externals referred to the same project (e.g. "foo
/trunk/common/foo" - see issue #1336), then that external would be
indistinguishable from a normal directory in the working copy?

For example, if the repository structure is:
 /trunk/ -
           - tool1
           - tool2
           - project1

Now you check out "project1" but want to get the "tool1" and "tool2"
directories.  So you set svn:externals to:
  tool1 /trunk/tool1
  tool2 /trunk/tool2

It would be really neat if subversion was able to pull over the "tool1"
and "tool2" directories and have it look exactly the same as if "tool1"
and "tool2" actually resided under "project1" in the repository.  That
way you could change files in tool1/, tool2/ and project1/ and just do 1
commit to check in everything. This is kindof related to issue #1167.

Also - if you did "svn cp /trunk/project1 /branch/project1_branch" then
tool1/ and tool2/ would automatically get copied to
/branch/project1_branch/tool1 and /branch/project1_branch/tool2,
respectively. Of course svn:externals would automatically have to get
updated (or better yet removed) at this point.  This is kindof related
to issue #1258.

Finally, it would be really nice if issue #937 was solved so that
svn:externals could refer to files as well as directories.

Would anyone else find these features useful?  Right now CVS can do most
of the above with modules but SVN and svn:externals is _much_ harder and
less intuitive to use.

Are these sorts of modifications to svn:externals possible?  Or is some
new mechanism required?

Thanks,
Will

Re: svn:externals feature(s)

[Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 11:35, William Lentz wrote:

> Would anyone else find these features useful?  Right now CVS can do
> most of the above with modules but SVN and svn:externals is _much_
> harder and less intuitive to use.

Absolutely agreed.  We've known about these shortcomings for a while,
and have some abstract plans to fix them.  The design isn't crystal
clear yet:  at the moment, we're thinking the "real" solution to the
problem is to simply allow completely unrelated working copies (from
unrelated repositories) to "link" to each other directly via entries
files.  Then svn:externals essentially becomes something only used by
'svn checkout' to assemble a composite working copy.  After you have the
working copy, all other commands just "work", and the svn:externals is
ignored.



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