Trouble with 'svn checkout --non-recursive' stickyness.

Hi:

My problem is that once I've checkout out a directory non-recursively, it can't be updated recursively. That is, the 'non-recursive' flag seems to be sticky for the working copy, and there is no command to clear that stickyness. Also, the behaviour just seems wierd. See below for example.

The following commands show the problem: (assume that //server/code/product/s/ex/trunk is a project with many subdirs and an external)

First, do a non-recursive checkout like this:

svn checkout -N http://server/code/products/ex/trunk .

That gives the top level of the directory, as expected, w/o fetching any svn:externals.

Then, give the same command again, but with/out non-recursive flag.

svn checkout http://server/code/products/ex/trunk .

This leaves the top level of the directory alone, but fetches the svn:externals. That's odd on two levels:
- first, if the --non-recursive flag is really sticky, then why is it fetching the externals in the second case but not in the first?
- second, I didn't specify non-recursive this time, so why didn't the command continue on and fetch all the subdirs? I could see "svn update" being sticky this
way, but "svn checkout"?

Finally, I tried this: (note, no trailing "." in this command - the target path argument is missing)

svn checkout http://server/code/products/ex/trunk

Hey - this version of the command recursively fetches everything!

I've looked around the issue database, and found issue 695 that seems somewhat related, so maybe I'm just detailing more odd behaviour from that. Anyway, what I would
have expected was either
1) a "--recursive" switch on the svn checkout command that could override the "non-recursive" stickiness.
2) that 'svn checkout' would be always recursive unless stated otherwise on the command-line, and that 'svn update' would pay attention to the sticky bit.

Rob.
(SVN version 1.1.3)
Received on Wed Feb 16 18:37:16 2005