"svn export" forgets svn:externals in local working copies

Hi. We just updated Subversion on our servers from 1.1.4 to 1.2.3 and
are therefore experiencing this issue:

https://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2429

The problem is that since Subversion 1.2.3 (possibly since 1.2.0?),
if you have a working copy which contains externals definitions, and
you export that working copy, then the export does not contain the
external items. If you instead export from the repository URL
directly, the external items are present.

We have a script which we use to deploy all of our projects, and it
relies on the now-broken behavior: we have a working copy on the
production server which the script updates, and then the script
exports the working copy to another location.

I can confirm the behavior with Subversion 1.2.3 on Gentoo Linux i386
and also with Subversion 1.3.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.6 PPC.

There seem to be no notes in the bug other than the initial reporting.

Does anybody have any additional information about this problem, or
suggestions for workarounds? Thinking about it for a moment, I can
think of the following workarounds:

* svn export the repository URL instead of the working copy. This is
fine for small projects but we also have some projects approaching
100MB and the time needed to pull all that over the net for each
release would be unfortunate, not to mention that we have to pay for
the bandwidth.

* Write our own svn export routine, which unless I'm mistaken should
just be:

        cp -RPp working-copy export
        find export -type d -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Or apparently (finding my way with rsync here):

        rsync --archive --cvs-exclude working-copy export-tmp
        mv export-tmp/working-copy export
        rmdir export-tmp

Any other ideas?

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Received on Wed Apr 19 14:10:07 2006