Re: Questions about --pin-externals option

On 2016-04-25, Stefan <luke1410_at_posteo.de> wrote:
> Hi Edwards,
>> A couple questions regarding "svn copy --pin-externals":
>>
>> 1) I thought I saw that when the --pin-externals option was being
>> developed it handled things differently when the destination was a
>> tag verses a branch.
>>
>> IIRC, copy --pin-externals to a "tag" destination just pinned the
>> revision to the current one (leaving the path the same), but if the
>> destination was a "branch" and the source was relative, it would
>> leave the version floating and change the path so it too pointed to
>> a branch (or something like that).
>>
>> Did the branch handling stuff get dropped?
>
> That would be news to me. As far as I'm aware SVN does not treat
> tags/branches special in any case.

My bad. I spent some time repeating my Google searchs and it looks
like I was conflating the "svn copy --pin-externals" feature with some
features of the "svncopy" script (which I may have misunderstood just
to make the situation worse).

>> 2) Are there server-side version dependancies for use of the
>> --pin-externals option? Or will it work with any server version?

> This client-side feature works with any server but requires a client
> >= 1.9. Note that the feature to specify externals with peg revisions
> was actually added in 1.5 already [1]. That said, if you use that
> feature all clients which access the repository should be >= 1.5 to
> understand the syntax correctly. 1.9 only added that command line
> option to simplify working with externals.

Thanks, that's what I thought, but wanted to make sure.

>> Where does one find documentation for 1.9 versions (the book only
>> covers versions up to 1.8)?

> The SVN book for 1.8 is the most resent version available atm. Most of
> the information should still apply to SVN 1.9. A good source for the
> newly added features would be the release notes [2].
>
> [1]: https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.5.html
> [2]: https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.9.html

Thanks again!

Now I just have to decided whether to use intra-repository externals
or nested working copies to share directories of source code among a
group of projects. It may depend on how smartsvn handles
tagging/branching that involves externals. I see that tortoisesvn has
something akin to --pin-externals, but haven't figured out if smartsvn
has something like that.

-- 
Grant