Sparse Directories Usage Questions

[Rush Manbert <ru...@manbert.com>]

For reasons that I won't go into, I need to be able to do script- 
driven platform-specific sparse checkout while also being able to do a  
simple "svn co" style checkout that just gets everything in the  
project tree.

Since Subversion 1.5 is available, I did some experiments with the new  
--depth and --set-depth parameters that support sparse directories.  
What I saw raises some questions that I hope can be answered here.

If seems that on svn checkout, use of --depth immediates or empty or  
files sets the depth metadata on one or more directories. In the case  
of --depth immediates, the top level directory carries  
depth=immediates, while its immediate child directories each carry  
depth = empty. This seems to be the only command where --depth  
actually writes the depth metadata. Other commands use --depth to  
limit the scope of the command, while svn up and svn switch both allow  
the use of --set-depth to (possibly) modify the depth metadata. Is  
this understanding correct?

If a directory has depth=immediates in its metadata and I execute "svn  
up --set-depth infinity dirOfInterest", the directory of interest's  
depth metadata will be set to "infinity" (or removed, which has he  
same effect). In addition, all of its immediate child directories will  
get their depth metadata set to "infinity". No other subdirectories in  
the tree will be modified. Is this the intended behavior? Will it  
always behave this way?

Assume I have the following repository structure under my trunk:

projects
   projectA
     mySources
     thirdPartyLibs
       installedWin
         libA
         libB
       installedMac
         libA
         libB
       sources
         libA
         libB

I want to do a checkout on the Mac. In this case, I do not want to  
populate either projectA/thirdPartyLibs/installedWin or projectA/ 
thirdPartyLibs/sources, but I do want to populate projectA/ 
thirdPartyLibs/installedMac.

I want to do the checkout as quickly as possible. I think the way to  
do it is as follows:
1) svn co --depth immediates projects/projectA workingDir
2) cd workingDir
3) svn up --set-depth immediates thirdPartyLibs
4) svn up --set-depth immediates thirdPartyLibs/installedWin
5) svn up --set-depth immediates thirdPartyLibs/sources
6) svn up --set-depth infinity thirdPartyLibs
7) svn up --set-depth infinity .

Step 4 checks out thirdPartyLibs/installedWin, marking its metadata  
with depth=immediates. It also checks out the libA and libB  
subdirectories and marks each of their metadata with depth=empty. Step  
5 does the equivalent for the thirdPartyLibs/sources subdirectory.

Step 6 marks thirdPartyLibs metadata with depth=infinity. It also  
marks thirdPartyLibs/installedWin and thirdPartyLibs/sources with  
depth=infinity, but it does NOT modify the depth=empty metadata on  
their children. This step will check out thirdPartyLibs/installedMac  
with depth=infinity, and will fully populate the tree.

Step 7 marks workingDir's metadata with depth=infinity It would do the  
same to thirdPartyLibs, but we already did that. It also checks out  
mySources with depth=infinity and fully populates the tree.

Does this look correct? Is there some other approach that would be  
better?

Thanks,
Rush

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