VSS style sharing of files (externals, vendor branches only for directories?)

We have a large project consisting of a number of common files plus several variants. The files live in a number of directories:

    \Variant_1
      \Application
      \Bootloader
      \Drivers

    \Variant_2
      \Application
      \Bootloader
      \Drivers

    \Common_Files
      \Application
      \Bootloader
      \Drivers

The common files will be modified over time, and we would like the changes to (automatically?) reflect in the variants. The variant files will also change, but those changes must not affect any other branches.

In SourceSafe this is accomplished by sharing the common files, but from what I can see Subversion does not have sharing - if a file is a copy from another branch it will remain unaltered even if the file in the parent branch is modified.

Someone else asked a similar question in this forum previously and was told to use the externals property, but according to the SVN 1.2 documenation this only works on directories. We need it to work on individual files as not all files in every directory will be shared. Similar comment for vendor branches, that seems to want to affect all the files in a directory.

Is there any way we can share individual files? Ideally commits to the variant branches do the right thing (update the common files, perhaps after a warning).

Neil

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Fri Aug 12 09:26:39 2005