----- Original Message ---- > I understand this is not common workflow, but I'd like to know if there is a > simple way to accomplish this goal before I start scripting a solution. > > Some background: one of the requirements for my organization moving to > subversion was the ability to create tags/branches that contain a subset of > files on the trunk. We accomplish this by creating the tag/branch, and svn > rm'ing any files that aren't required until we've arrived at the desired > fileset. We work with very large files and need to use subsets of files to > avoid lots of disk usage/network traffic.
That is quite an unusual work flow. And with the efficiency of SVN, you're really probably just saving the disk space - may be. Network traffic would mostly occur during initial checks; the rest (namely updates) is pretty efficient. > Some users have asked if it is possible to check out multiple tags into the > same > workspace. That is, if we have tag a and tag b with files independent of one > another but common directories, is it possible to check out a workspace that > is > an amalgamation of tag a and tag b. Merge doesn't get me what I need because > the merge replays all of the file deletes that were used to generate a subset > tag. > > So my question is: is there a way to get two branches/tags to live in the > same > workspace? Your best way to accomplish this is to create another branch (e.g. UNION_A_B) and then use svn:externals to map the two you want to bring together into sub-folders. SVN cannot (at least to my knowledge) operate on individual files within a folder in this manner. So basically: branch/A branch/B branch/UNION_A_B branch/UNION_A_B/A -> branch/A branch/UNION_A_B/B -> branch/B this will result in any updates to branch/A being seen on update in either location. Likewise with branch/B. The user only needs to check out branch/UNION_A_B to get both. Additionally, since you are using the svn:externals property, branch/UNION_A_B/A and branch/UNION_A_B/B don't really exist in the repository, but are stored as properties (e.g. absolute minimal storage) that tell the SVN client to checkout those as sub-directories of branch/UNION_A_B - so disk space and network traffic are both minimized as well. HTH, Ben
