On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 11:34:07AM +0000, Matthew J Fletcher wrote: > Hi, > > As discussed in this thread,.. > > http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4061&dsMessageId=2939615 > > Do you think svn checkout should be defensive against recursive externals ?
At elego (where I work) we actually use this as a trick question during Subversion workshops. People who don't necessarily know about externals are asked to check out a working copy (which, unknown to them, contains recursive externals) and are asked to figure out if anything is going wrong and if so how to fix it. Once they've figured out and fixed the problem they understand what externals are :) That aside, I wouldn't mind if svn printed a warning or error message when it finds a recursive externals definition. But off-hand I don't what a good method for detecting recursion would be. It's somewhat complicated by the fact that externals are currently separate working copies and that the recursion might be rooted not only at the immediate parent WC but at some parent of the parent. Cross-working-copy operations aren't trivial to implement correctly.
