Merging with sparse checkouts

Hi all,

We make very heavy use of sparse checkouts. They're absolutely key for us, as our product consists of many directories, only a handful of which will actually change on any given branch. A complete working copy is too large and unwieldy to deal with - checking out takes hours, and any operations at the root (even status) take too long to reasonably wait, or even crash the client. However, sparse checkouts create problems with merging between branches, as we end up with subtree mergeinfo and cannot reintegrate into trunk.

I'd like to be able to create branches where only a subset of directories are actually going to change on that branch, and be able to merge changes only in those directories between the branch and trunk - but without doing each directory individually, as they're still quite numerous. Is there a way to do this? Perhaps something along the lines of
 * merge into a sparse checkout, and have the "reintegrate" merge understand that the missing directories had no changes, or
 * delete the unwanted directories from the branch, but in such a way that said deletion is not merged back into trunk?

Thanks in advance!

 - Chris
Received on 2010-04-08 04:36:06 CEST