Re: Problem with svn:externals

On Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 08:20:15PM -0500, Gopalakrishnan, Dinesh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are in the progress of migrating from cvs to svn. I am looking
> at the svn:externals as an alternative for cvs modules file.
>
> It seemed to work pretty much as expected, except for the
> following scenario.
>
> I have folder-A, on which svn externals is set in such a way that
> when folder-A is checked out, it would check out folder-B,
> folder-C and folder-D inside folder-A.
>
> $ svn co <url>/Folder-A
> A Folder-A
> A Folder-A/Folder-B
> A Folder-A/Folder-C
> A Folder-A/Folder-D
>
> $ cd Folder-A
>
> when i edit any of the file in Folder-B and do a svn ci from
> Folder-A, it works as expected. However, when i do changes in
> files in Folder-B, Folder-C and Folder-D, and then when i do a
> svn ci from Folder-A, the check-in does not happen.
>
> `svn status` would state files in Folder-B, Folder-C and Folder-D
> are modified. But the commit from Folder-A would not work as
> expected.
>
> So, my requirement here is that when i do a `svn ci` from
> Folder-A, i want all the changes in Folder-B, Folder-C and
> Folder-D to be checked-in.

I don't think externals were designed for this.
Externals should AFAIK be considered "read-only".

See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.advanced.externals.html
again, especially the second info box starting with "You should
seriously consider using explicit revision numbers in all of your
externals definitions."

You should probably just put the directory structure
you want into the repository without using externals.

The concept of "modules" as it exists in CVS does not really
exist in Subversion. Instead, you get to check out any part
of the tree you are interested in, no matter how large or
small that part is. Module boundaries are conventions.

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