On Oct 27, 2009, at 4:35 PM, Daniel Widenfalk wrote:
> David Corley wrote:
>> Hey all,
>> We've just implemented Subversion at our workplace, and after getting
>> everything running well together we ran into an odd problem last
>> week.
>> One of our less experience team members inadvertently created an
>> svn:externals reference on a directory to a higher-level directory in
>> the same repository. This had the unfortunate effect of infinite
>> recursion on the directory, which in turn made updating difficult
>> to say
>> the least.
>>
>> My multi-part question is:
>> 1. Does a subversion working copy contain the reference to the
>> repository where it was checked-out from?
>> 2. Assuming 1) is true, are there valid reasons why SVN would allow a
>> repo to have an svn:external reference to itself?
>> 3. Assuming 2) is false, is there a design case for some sort of
>> check
>> on the svn:external property to ensure it doesn't reference the
>> current
>> repository?
>>
>> WRT to 1), I'm guessing the alternative is that the SVN client rather
>> than the working copy retains the reference to the repo.
>> WRT to 3), There's only a major issue if the svn:external property
>> references a directory higher in the hierarchy than that which has
>> the
>> svn:external property, which causes the infinite recursion.
>>
>> I'll welcome any comments on the issue.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Dave
>
> Hi all,
>
> I gave this a dime of my time and figured that you'd get a
> similar problem with two (or more) repositories that cross
> reference each other using svn:external. The only possible
> solution I can see would be for the client checkout code to
> handle this (if at all possible).
We also just gave it a few minutes' discussion at the currently on-
going Hackathon, and decided the short answer was "don't do that". It
turns out that Subversion's handling of externals doesn't have very
much information to detect this recursive relationship. Even worse,
detecting a simple recursion might be easier, but detecting transitive
recursion is Hard. So "don't do that." :)
-Hyrum
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Received on 2009-10-27 16:50:57 CET