Doing svn checkouts on top of svn checkouts?????

I just ran into a fascinating configuration where someone is doing
Subversion checkouts on top of existing Subversion checkouts. I'd
never even *THOUGHT* of pulling such a stunt, but it's apparently
workable.

I'm concerned, though, that any change in the source of the Subversion
checkout to a branch or tag will simply break things, or any
reloaction of the source repository component will also break things.
I'm also concerned that, should someone mix and match components
inside the working copy manually, things will break in fascinating
fashion, or that locally modified components will only be updated, not
actually replaced.

Has anyone been using this feature? It seems to work to do an "svn
checkout" on top of an existing working copy of the same URL or
earlier releases, but I've not tried rolling back the revision number
or other games. I could spend a bunch of time checkout out border
cases, but would welcome insights.
Received on 2011-07-12 02:08:55 CEST