Access to non SVN files via svn property - Feature request

Hi all,

What feature do we suggest? A new svn property (aliens? :-) to reach
"pure" http paths; during svn checkouts, when this property is followed,
the standard http protocol is used and the resulting subtree is marked as
"specially managed", so that svn status does not see it as a standard
unversioned tree (this is to avoid that the user, by mistake, adds the
tree to SVN repo. Similar ideas apply for svn export and svn commit.

Here is the background: in our company we have been managing SVN
repositories since 2007; one of these repo has more than 800000 revisions
and uses almost 140GB.
The reason for this large size is that, despite of the rules we stated,
many users committed big binary files. Some were by mistake, some because
the users found SVN the most reasonable place.
For the latter case I am referring to libraries and artifacts that are
necessary to build the final product, that will be stored using the
company PLM tool, not in SVN repo.
We then introduced an artifact repository manager, namely Sonatype Nexus,
to store these artifacts; we store in Nexus any kind of artifact,
whichever is the programming language used to produce it.
For development trees we are used to set svn:externals property to access
source files, possibly in other SVN repositories; we know it is "legal" to
access binary files and libraries too, provided they are stored in a
Subversion repository. But we strongly discourage such a behaviour and
suggest to use Nexus instead.
What is our build process for a large project?
The modules are debugged and tested, the resulting artifact is stored (and
versioned) on Nexus.
When programmers have to produce the final product they need to have a
complete tree, made of sources for the main tree and of objects/libraries
for the modules.
The problem is well known: it is impossible to access Nexus repositories
via http through svn:externals: SVN expects to use the same protocol for
the whole tree, externals included.

I did not find anything useful on the web, apart from the suggestion to
use scripts to produce the correct environment, but such a solution
depends on the development environment: for some developers it is very
easy, for others it is not.

Thanks in advance,
Francesco Policastro
Product Data & Configuration Management
Selex ES, A Finmeccanica Company
Via Puccini 2
16154 Genova (Italia)
(Tel.) +39 010 6584092
(Email) francesco.policastro_at_selex-es.com
www.selex-es.com

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