Feature Request: Merge svn:ignore property recursively

Hi,

I haven't found anything about this in the Issue Tracker, but I think
this would a real improvement:

The 'svn:ignore' property of directories can be set recursively. But
this action OVERRIDES all settings of the directories below.

Example:

dir_above (svn:ignore= pattern_all)
+ dir_below (svn:ignore= pattern_all + pattern_special)

Now I want to add a ignore pattern (pattern_added) to the whole tree:
If I add it recursively to 'dir_above' the result is:

dir_above (svn:ignore= pattern_all + pattern_added)
+ dir_below (svn:ignore= pattern_all + pattern_added)

thus losing 'pattern_special' of the subdirectory.
One should be able to get the result

dir_above (svn:ignore= pattern_all + pattern_added)
+ dir_below (svn:ignore= pattern_all + pattern_special + pattern_added)

There should be a way to add a new value to existing property values,
especially
those that contain a value list.
Some ways that I could imagine:
1. a new comand 'svn propupdate <prop> <val>' that simply adds the given
value
    to every value of the prop in every subdir (if called with -R)
2. a more sophisticated mechanism that checks if a property value is a list
of values
    like in svn:ignore and performs a merging operation on it
    (maybe as an extra command, too, like 'svn propmerge'?)
3. Enhance 'svn propset' by an additional option like '--merge-values' that
is only
    regarded when --recursive is used. When this option is used the command
tries
    to check if the value is a value list and merges the new value to it.
   (Seems not the best solution to me though...)

I think I would prefer 1. Seems easiest to me, leaving a lot responsibility
for
setting the value right to the user, but I guess this should not be too bad.
2. would be safer, but I don't know if this would be too much overhead...

Basically I would deem this a very useful enhancement...

Thanks for feedback,

Regards,
Jörg
Received on Thu Feb 15 11:19:36 2007