Re: Adding -c to export?

Joshua Varner wrote:
> I've seen a number of requests for the ability to export just the files
> that have changed in a particular revision, e.g. for updating a web
> site. Often the cost of the working copy or having a firewall keeps
> the website from being a working copy, and using update.

See:
        http://search.cpan.org/dist/SVN-Notify-Mirror/

for way to get around firewall issues; you still need a working copy
someplace, though it could be a local one and use rsync vs. the remote
server. I'm thinking of writing a new transport method which would use
the Perl bindings to replicate the actions of an update vs. a remote
directory without requiring a working copy at all.

However, I've also been thinking about this from the Subversion end, but
in a different direction. I have previously complained that export
shares almost no code with update/checkout, even though it is almost
exactly the same thing (apart from writing admin files). There was at
least some positive noise from the core developers that making export
share more code with the other methods would be a Good Thing(TM).

If export was exactly the same thing as checkout/update, minus the admin
files, then it would be straightforward to support:

        svn export --update svn://url

so that export could be used to *update* an existing exported tree.
Local updates would either cause a conflict (in this case the file would
not get updated), or --force could be used to overwrite local changes.
At all times, the information as to what files to delete, add, patch,
etc. is available to do those on a admin-less export tree (with a little
finesse to generate a virtual entries file).

It seems like the actions in update.c:svn_client__update_internal()
could be enhanced to create in-memory replicas of what the admin files
would look like (minus the text-base files).

Is this a pipe-dream?

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
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