Recursive externals problem

I've seem similar questions in the mail list but haven't found a convincing solutions, so I would like to start a discussion on following problem again.

Example:
projectB -depend-on-> projectA
projectC -depend-on-> projectA
projectD -depend-on-> projectA, projectB, projectC

When I checkout projectB, projectA will be checkout through externals property, when I checkout projectC, projectA will be checkout through externals property as well. For projectD, it is configured with 3 externals properties to projectA, projectB and projectC, so when I checkout projectD, projectA, projectB and projectC will be checkout as well, but projectA will be checkout thrice as projectB and projectC also configured with externals properties to it.

As my project grow larger, the extra checkout causes by the recursive externals checkout became a major problem as a lot of time and space are wasted. In the example above, I only need 3 projects but svn checkout 5 of them.

I read a bit on the new "--depth" option but not quite sure about whether it is the solution to this problem or not. Anyone can share some ideas on how to deal with this kind of problem?

IMHO, I'm thinking of adding a new "recursive level" option in the externals property might help, for the example above, in externals properties of projectD we specify the "recursive level" of projectA, projectB, projectC to be "0", thus svn will only checkout projectA, projectB and projectC, and will not checkout externals properties of projectB and projectC, thus we will have only 1 copy of projectA. I would like to gather more opinions on this before I decide to try to work on patch for this option.

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Received on 2008-12-09 22:49:47 CET