Request for comments on our vendor library structure

Hi

We are developing a fairly large application that uses open source libraries. We have one svn repo per application. Currently, the open source libraries are all stored with the application. This is a bad idea because the working copy and repo are now very large. Also, every branch gets a copy of all the open source code.

So I propose to move the open source libraries into a separate repository. We can then reference that code either using externals or, more likely, environment variables in the build files. I prefer the latter because then the open source code will never appear in the project's working copy and we can easily exclude it from branches if it is not required.

So how should I structure the open source (vendor) library repo? I was thinking of the following:

OpenSourceLibs
       |
       |---- Boost
       | |---- tags
       | |---- trunk
       |
       |---- wxWidgets
       | |---- tags
       | |---- trunk
etc.

That way, I can tag each library individually.

We then check out OpenSourceLibs beside the application's working copy, and specify in the makefiles which libraries to use by referencing the tags.

My concern is that each developer must correctly checkout and maintain his/her OpenSourceLibs working copy. It would be best to do this as a sparse working copy so they only get what is needed, but that is not easy for the developer to do as I have a repo of projects of tags i.e. several layers for him to manage. Or they could just checkout and update the entire OpenSourceLibs folder, but that would be very large.

Would anyone like to suggest how best to handle this please?

Best regards

David

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Received on 2011-02-08 10:17:52 CET