Checkout through link ignores rev parameter

Thanks very much Johan. This clears up a lot.

We know how we would want it to work. I'm guessing that if we need it "fixed", that we would need to get the souce, make our fix, and build our own version? That has the advantage of giving us control on how it works for us, but makes updating to future versions complicated and risky.

-----Original Message-----
From: Johan Corveleyn [mailto:jcorvel_at_gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 10:33 AM
To: Dalton, Bill (GE Energy Connections) <Bill.Dalton_at_ge.com>
Cc: users_at_subversion.apache.org; Hannold, Bill (GE Energy Connections) <Bill.Hannold_at_ge.com>; Hawker, Jason (GE Energy Connections) <jason.hawker_at_ge.com>
Subject: EXT: Re: Checkout through link ignores rev parameter

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:23 PM, Dalton, Bill (GE Energy Connections) <Bill.Dalton_at_ge.com> wrote:
> Johan,
>
> Thanks for your response.
>
> When I saw this description, I thought, "Oh yes. That's our problem." However, I think the thread I was looking at said it was fixed in 1.6. Our Subversion server is 1.9.2. Almost all of our agents are 1.9.4. A couple of the agents are 1.7.9. So, it doesn't seem to be the same problem. Or maybe there is a path to get to that failure that wasn't fixed.
>
> Sorry about the terminology. I'm not familiar with how these links are implemented. I have assumed that they were just Unix links. I know that what looks like a file is actually a pointer to another location which contains the actual file.
>
> Bill

No, the issue I referred you to, SVN-2516 [1] is not fixed, not even in trunk. It's status in JIRA is "open", and I think that's correct.
The mail thread linked from the issue also ends without a conclusion (there doesn't seem to be a definitive consensus on how it should behave, and whether or not the new behaviour would need an option flag, or if it would become the default). I don't see any mention of a fix being in 1.6.

Also: externals are quite different from unix symlinks. For starters, they are a working-copy-only thing ... the server doesn't know / understand the link. It only sees a property ("svn:externals"), but it doesn't interpret nor understand this property. It's just the svn client which does some extra work when it sees such an svn:externals property, by pulling in the extra items from the pointed-to repository location into the working copy.

[1] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__issues.apache.org_jira_browse_SVN-2D2516&d=DQIFaQ&c=IV_clAzoPDE253xZdHuilRgztyh_RiV3wUrLrDQYWSI&r=yvIDsFuVzfRgZstZ_Ob6IPM_fQ2qEpHAciKWAEBRKA4&m=OjI4KWOlP8rGDQtrJKCFFx3f2vQx0In8f-bDqoYN3Hg&s=D3CKhlT2ScQ30LG4Ab8PCMFaKzTjuCGDtRbrTZP-nhM&e=

--
Johan