(resend as plaintext to fix formatting) (I did some searching for an answer here and elsewhere, and didn't find it; sorry if I missed it.)
The project I'm dealing with has the SVN repository arranged like so: proj/top1/branches/ proj/top1/tags/ proj/top1/trunk/ proj/top2/common/branches/ proj/top2/common/tags/ proj/top2/common/trunk/ proj/top2/thingA/branches/ proj/top2/thingA/tags/ proj/top2/thingA/trunk/ proj/top2/thingB/branches/ proj/top2/thingB/tags/ proj/top2/thingB/trunk/ proj/top2/deploy/common/branches/ proj/top2/deploy/common/tags/ proj/top2/deploy/common/trunk/ proj/top2/deploy/thingA/env1/branches/ proj/top2/deploy/thingA/env1/tags/ proj/top2/deploy/thingA/env1/trunk/ proj/top2/deploy/thingA/env2/branches/ proj/top2/deploy/thingA/env2/tags/ proj/top2/deploy/thingA/env2/trunk/ proj/top2/deploy/thingB/env1/branches/ proj/top2/deploy/thingB/env1/tags/ proj/top2/deploy/thingB/env1/trunk/ (etc) First, I completely agree that this organization has issues. Changing is isn't an option. I'll spare you the details. :-/ My question is: how to checkout and update at the proj/ level without getting the content of all the tags/ and branches/ directories? The "Sparse Directories" features of SVN (--depth and --set-depth) sounded good: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.advanced.sparsedirs.html But those features are not sufficient. In order to do a fresh checkout of the above and avoid the massive on-disk redundancy that would occur due to the content of tags/ and branches/, each trunk/ directory must be checked out individually. Other than creating a brittle script that lists each trunk/ directory, I don't see a solution. Even then, each branches/ and tags/ directory needs to be marked with --set-depth as well. I also discovered that "svn co URL/proj/top1 --depth immediates" can take a very long time for a tree with tons of content. Seems like a bug (using SlikSvn 1.6.15). Similarly, something like "svn update URL/proj/top1/tags -depth immediates" would be handy at times to get just the empty subdirectories, named after each branch or tag. Updating just one of those subdirectories would allow mass-diffs between the trunk or another branch/tag. I don't see why a depth-limited operation like that should take so much time. I though about using 'svn list http://.../proj/'; and grep'ing the result for "/trunk", but that one command takes over 10 minutes - not feasible. A checkout of all the trunk/ directory contents only takes 2.5 minutes. So: has anyone found a clean way to handle checkouts and updates when branches/tags/trunk directories are strewn all over a tree? Thanks.
