RE: Switching

Thanks for the reply Les.

Actually I would call the problem the way I am using the tool. Since no one has provided a better solution there may not be one. Perhaps no one considered switching between branches where there could exist a directory with unversioned files in one and not the other. I don't know. Maybe no one wanted to make it work since they never needed that feature. I don't know. After reading tons of material on subversion I thought it would be good to keep development for individual features in separate branches. But the cost is easily out weighing the benefit.

And one of the files I am ignoring is user settings which is required for testing. Deleting that file would just introduce more trouble causing the user to repeatedly re-enter settings to test code. The output is already directed away to a development directory. I see no way to delete the intermediate files which would get constantly re-created anyway and would not solve the problem because the user settings file would still cause the same issue. And the developers need their own settings.

Before I started trying to learn the branching (which I didn't even get to yet since simply switching is causing so much grief) I would jot down on a piece of paper which projects affected which feature and do all the development in the trunk then only put in production what was needed. This worked. It just seems strange to have to keep notes on a piece of paper which modules are for which feature using source code control software.

But if that's how subversion works, then that's how it works.

-----Original Message-----
From: Les Mikesell [mailto:lesmikesell_at_gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2013 11:00 AM
To: John Maher
Cc: Andrew Reedick; Thorsten Schöning; Subversion help
Subject: Re: Switching

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 6:30 AM, John Maher <JohnM_at_rotair.com> wrote:
>
> @Andrew there is no need for a svn copy. I do not want to copy a feature in one branch to another; I wish to keep the code isolated.
>
> And yes I know subversion won't delete unversioned files, I appreciate the info on how subversion works. Some of it was helpful. I was hoping to hear how others may have solved the same problem.

Your problem is not so much that svn doesn't deleted the unversioned files, but that it can't delete the directory containing them.

> But it seems the only answer is a tedious and manual process for the simplest of enhancements.

Don't your build tools have commands to remove any spurious files they've created or some equivalent of 'make clean' that you can run to remove the clutter in a non-tedious way so that svn switch is free to work correctly with the versioned content?

> I was hoping to find what others seem to praise, but have continually come up empty handed. I'll check stackoverflow before I give up.

If the big picture is including library components and their containing directories in some versions and not others, the simple solution might be to give the components their own location in the repository (or a different one) and pull them in only as needed with
svn externals. But, I think you still have to clean up the
unversioned clutter so a switch can remove the directory when it is
not wanted. A slightly different approach is to version the built
component binaries and access them with externals, but that has its own issues in multi-platform scenarios.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell_at_gmail.com