Greetings to all subversive^H^Honed elements! [Maybe this should have gone to dev, but as this is our 1st mail to the SVN MLs, we'll stick to the advice "if in doubt: users".]
We use the svn:externals feature quite extensively in our software projects, as it allows for a nice modular concept. Basically we have a software product mainline, which uses svn:externals to include * base libraries * various functional extensions * data (lexica for various languages etc.) * client-specific data/code We're quite up-to-date with SVN versions, all developers run 1.6.12 (r955767), which is also installed on our repository servers. What we're really missing is a more fine-grained handling of these externals when doing an export or checkout. Currently, these commands only accept the '--ignore-externals' option, which seems like a big ON/OFF switch clubbing the issue to death. We'd propose the following functional extension: 1) add a possible parameter (list) to the --ignore-externals where one could actually name the URLs (or even better, user regexp/glob patterns for matching) that are to be ignored. The rest would be accepted/included in the export/checkout. 2) add a new option --accept-externals, also with the same possible parameter list, which would name the externals that are to be accepted for checkout/export. The rest would be ignored. Usage of these two options would be mutually exclusive. Of course. This could be a quite seamless and compatible update path, as the default behavior for giving these options without parameters would imply the parameters "all", not changing anything in existing scripts using the --ignore-externals option. Currently, we have no way of telling svn export to just export "this this and this" or "all but not this" that is referenced by svn:externals. This functional enhancement would spare a lot of scripting and kludging. Comments? Is this desirable or are we missing some options that already emulate this behaviour? -- regards, Marcel @ PetaMem R&D