Let me share the following component development structure and the use
of subversion externals, to know if any of you have experienced the same
kind of problem.
We are doing a lot of Java, C and fortran development, and are using
subversion as our version control environment. One concept we give high
priority is that each developer must be able to build a application from
scratch. All our applications are build out of assets. Each assets has
references to other assets. So if a developer makes a working copy of
the top level asset all referenced asset are automatically fetched as
well. Subversion uses the svn:external property for this purpose. If the
checkout is done the developer can use the IDE to compile and build the
application. So far so good. However the problem arises when duplicate
assets are fetched by the svn:external property. Fetching assets using
the svn:external is very powerful, because it fetches all the references
recursively, but if somewhere down this line an assets is fetched which
is already fetched higher up in the hierarchy the compilation in Java
will fail with the duplicate class error. The problem gets even worse if
these assets are of a different revisions. In our development
environment we have decided to use only the highest version number, and
this implies that all (or most of them) assets are upwards compatible.
It would be nice if we could use subversion and its svn:external
property to get all assets and their children assets. It works fine for
more hierarchy levels if all assets are different, but we would like to
implement this for fetching assets and their externals recursively even
for the same assets, with the same of different revisions.
Any ideas, thoughts are practical tips.
Kor Molenmaker
MARIN, Wageningen
The Netherlands.
Received on Fri Apr 29 13:27:25 2005