Re: svn:externals - construction of cyclic references is not prevented by TortoiseSVN

Hi Bob,

2009/10/2 Meinc <meinc_at_web.de>:
> Hi,
>
> today we have edited our svn repository and accidentally added a self-reference, i.e. a reference established by means of svn:externals.
> It would be helpful, if self references would be rejected by SVNTortoise at the time of creation, since the retrieval of such cyclic repositories may cause some serious problems.
> We had some luck, the only problem was to get rid of file paths with more that 255 characters which required some extra effort.
> Although this problem principally relies on the lack of preventing this property setting in svn, maybe it would be worth to reject such mistakes with some high level description on the client side.
>

It is difficult to prevent these cycles, since they can span multiple
repositories (A defines an external to B defines an external to A).

At the working copy level, it is not always possible to 'see' all the
way up to the root of the repository and back down again. You could
have a specific branch checked out where you create an external to
some other part of the repository, only on updating the WC when that
part gets to your WC will it become apparent that that part had an
external reference to your branch...

And remember, there are a lot of use cases where externals to the same
repository are relevant, so just preventing externals to a target with
the same repository UUID is out of the question.

-- 
Regards,
Jean-Marc
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