[svk-users] Can only switch checkout root - WHY?

[Rush Manbert]

Hi,

My first post here.

We are in the process of moving a fairly complicated repository from CVS 
to SVN. We would also like to use SVK as a client for the repository.

I had written a script that does a checkout using SVN. The checkout 
process is a little complicated because we want to do platform-specific 
checkouts. (For instance, we use third party libraries and each 
platform's installed libs directory is about 500 MB. We don't want to 
check out that much stuff that we don't need.) The SVN external feature 
doesn't cut it, and I finally discovered that you can use svn switch for 
this.

So the checkout script checks out a top level directory, and some of its 
subdirectories are empty, but their properties contain metadata that 
points to their "real" content. We go to each directory, see if it has 
"real" content for the platform we're on (or all platforms), and switch 
it if it does.

This works really well.

I tried to do the same thing using SVK, but got the error message:

"Can only switch checkout root."

While this is nicely punctuated, with a period and everything, it seems 
like an artificial limitation. It makes SVK unusable for us.

Is there some good reason why SVK doesn't support all of the switch 
scenarios that are supported by SVN?

- Rush