On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 01:49:03PM -0000, Hutchinson, Steve (UK) wrote: > Hi, > > Currently we are attempting to use svn externals to help build various > projects from what I would call a few "reuse" repositories. We are > attempting to be "structured" as to what level of design hierarchy we > apply the properties but sometimes when we inherit a design people can > spend a bit of time trying to identify where externals have been used. > > Is there a simple way of identifying in a structure folders that have > external properties, come to think of it maybe any form of property ?
The designers of the externals feature envisioned maybe a handful of external library dependencies that don't vary much over time. These are automatically pulled into a working copy, much like an automated svn checkout. But the design doesn't account for what happens when people start using svn:externals for variant management or large-scale component reuse. If you're pulling together project components from externals in various combinations, like lego blocks, or simply have many externals, don't use the svn:externals properties as the primary source of your configuration data. Do it the other way: Store your component configuration in a versioned file or even a database, and write a script to configure svn:externals properties based on that data. Maybe even add an automated check into the mix that makes sure the svn:externals in the repository's HEAD revision are in sync with your primary externals configuration source. You can query a file or a database easily to find out which components are used where. But svn properties haven't been designed for this use case. You cannot query a Subversion repository like you can query a database. Well, you could crawl the repository, but that's quite slow. Hope this helps, Stefan
