Re: copying subdirectories in subversion 1.7

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 10:37:36AM +0200, Markus Schaber wrote:
> Hi, Stefan,
>
> Von: Stefan Sperling [mailto:stsp_at_elego.de]
> >> [Detaching of subdirectories of working copies]
> > Honestly, we simply don't know how many people need this.
>
> Strictly speaking, it is not "needed" by anyone - one can always use a
> fresh checkout, and then manually merge all the changes.

1.7 has 'svn patch' so transferring local changes to a new checkout
can be done in an automated way.

 cd ~/wc/subtree
 svn diff > /tmp/subtree-changes.diff
 cd ~
 svn co $URL/subtree other_wc
 svn patch /tmp/subtree-changes.diff other_wc
 
This works fine even for new directories, deleted ones, etc.
Caveat: It cannot do copies yet -- those will show up as simple adds.

> But in my experience, a lot of users (including me) actually made use of
> the "copying a subdir just works" pattern.

Good to know.

But note that it doesn't always work as expected in 1.6.x, even.
Quoting the first comment in
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2884

  "you can't just copy a subtree of the added dir and expect it
   to work without its parent."

This is a consequence of the fact the feature is accidental.
Some edge cases just do not work because the feature hasn't actually
been designed and implemented. It just happens to work most of the time.
Received on 2011-07-25 12:06:02 CEST