disjoint working copies

Dimitri Papadopoulos-Orfanos dimitri.papadopoulos-orfanos at cea.fr
Wed May 31 10:43:15 CDT 2006


Hi,

There's a need to be able to check out disjoint subtrees of a repository
and commit atomic changes to these subtrees. For example the whole
repository could be too large to be checked out into a user account, but
the user still needs to modify related files throughout the repository.
See for example:
	http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2006-05/1074.shtml
	http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-12/0657.shtml
	http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2004-09/1124.shtml
	http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2004-08/0015.shtml

Maybe the book could expand on available solutions:

1) Use externals to checkout subtrees of interest, but then it's not
possible to commit single changes across subtrees.
This is already documented here:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.2/svn.advanced.externals.html
but could be moved to a specific paragraph.

2) Check out the whole repository and prune subtrees that are not needed
using 'svn switch'. The whole repository still needs to fit in the
initial disk space. Also this is a bit of a bad hack, having for example
to specify that these subtrees are not needed:
	/repos/project-foo/branches/0.1
	/repos/project-foo/branches/0.2
	...
	/repos/project-foo/branches/9.7
	/repos/project-foo/branches/9.8
instead of simply specifying that this subtree is needed:
	/repos/project-foo/branches/9.9

3) Use the '-N' option as suggested on users at subversion.tigris.org,
although I still don't understand how to use it :-( Unfortunately this
option is currently broken:
	http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=695


I guess a specific feature could be added to Subversion. For example
Perforce mounts different subtrees through 'p4 client' and permits
single commits to these subtrees. In the meanwhile, could the Subversion
book document this issue?

Regards,
Dimitri Papadopoulos





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