[svk-devel] SVK views clarification

[Wincent Colaiuta]

First up, congratulations and thanks to Chia-liang Kao and Best  
Practical for their work on SVK.

My question is about the SVK views feature.

I'm currently experimenting with layering SVK over my existing  
Subversion workflow so as to take advantage of its many cool features  
(above all, the excellent branching/merging). One of the problems is  
that I make light use of the svn:externals feature and this is not  
currently supported by SVK.

I see that this came up in the list archives in January[1] and the  
recommendation was to look at SVK's views feature. I've looked at the  
output of "svk help view" and it's not entirely clear to me how I  
would go about using this as a substitute for externals. Can anyone  
provide a quick walkthrough?

I also note that views are not yet recommended for production use[2].  
Any idea on when they might be?

Finally, I found one other suggestion for working around the absence  
of externals[3]: "SVK doesn't do svn:externals. I worked with this by  
mirroring every plugin and Rails, and using SVK copy to put a  
particular version into my working copy."

Not really sure that I like that last one because evidently the copy  
won't automatically pick up updates, but neither does it rely on a  
feature that's still in beta... Any other suggestions?

Cheers,
Wincent

[1] http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/svk-devel/2007-January/ 
000567.html
[2] http://bestpractical.typepad.com/worst_impractical/2007/01/ 
svk_20_is_bette.html
[3] http://cwilliams.textdriven.com/articles/2007/02/16/svn-and-svk