Working with subsets (was: Re: checking directory existence in a working copy)

Ryan, thanks for your reply to my previous enquiry. OK, non-recursive
checkout is currently broken, so I tried a different approach to work
with partial trees, but I still need some help in figuring out how to do
this efficiently in subversion.

I need to periodically checkout a subset of the trunk for testing and
releasing of the subset. In CVS I did this by moving to a release branch
only the subset of files that I wanted. I could then test on the
release branch, merge fixes back and forth between trunk and branch and
eventually tag the release. This worked well since updates, diffs and
merges in CVS were automatically restricted to the set of files that
belonged to the branch.

The "subversion way" of defining special collections of files seems to
be "svn cp", so I tried the following. I did an "svn cp" of /trunk to
/template and did "svn rm" of anything in /template that I didn't want
in the subset. My idea was that any time I want to create a release
branch of this subset, I would merge into /template any change that has
happened in the trunk since the last merge to /template and then "svn cp
.../template .../branches/my-release". I could then test the release,
merge fixes back and forth between my-release and trunk and so on.

_The problem:_ "svn merge" on the top directory does not just merge
changes to all files present in the working copy, but also re-creates
any file that is missing. Of course this is what one would require of
merge most of the times, but in this case it undoes all the work that
went into defining my subset of files.

_My questions:_ Is there a simpler way of working with subsets of the
trunk? If not, what is the best way of synchronizing a branch to the
trunk avoiding the creation of missing files?

Cheers,

Giuseppe

--
>
> On 18.08.2005, at 09:26, Giuseppe Scelsi wrote:
>
> > svn co --non-recursive svn://.../trunk/a my-dir
>
> Non-recursive checkout is currently broken:
>
> http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#nonrecursive-checkout
>
>
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