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Re: Checking out individual files

From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch_at_stats.uwo.ca>
Date: 2007-01-26 01:38:53 CET

On 1/25/2007 7:25 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>
>>> (apparently) can't check out individual files within a directory.
>>>
>>> I'm told that this was a design decision made by the Subversion
>>> architects.
>>>
>>> My question was ... What was the reasoning behind this decision?
>>>
>>> If you can check out a subdirectory within a repository without having
>>> to check out the whole repository, why not also then be able to check
>>> out an individual file within a subdirectory?
>> Because the .svn subdirectory is part of the subdirectory you check out,
>> allowing checkouts to be moved around without losing their metadata. If
>> you checked out a file, where would the metadata go?
>>
>
> Cvs wants to create a new directory for the initial checkout
> and put a CVS directory in it for metadata too, but it still
> lets you specify that only a single file is checked out into
> that directory if that is what you want - even if the repository
> directory contains more files.

svk also keeps metadata external to the checkout. There are lots of
ways to do this, but they all break the rule that the checkout is self
contained. Eric was asking for the reasoning behind the svn design, and
I'm guessing that's the reasoning.

One thing I should have said in my original post: that's just a guess,
I didn't participate in the design at all.

Duncan Murdoch

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Received on Fri Jan 26 01:42:51 2007

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