[svk-devel] Notes on svn:externals support

[Chia-Liang Kao]

Hi,

On 28/03/07, Wincent Colaiuta <win at wincent.com> wrote:
> I've just written up some notes on adding svn:externals support to SVK:
>
> http://wincent.com/knowledge-base/
> Implementing_svn:externals_support_in_SVK
>
> I've also written notes about how to work around the lack of
> svn:externals support in the meantime:
>
> http://wincent.com/knowledge-base/
> Working_around_the_lack_of_svn:externals_support_in_SVK

Thanks for the writeup and the workaround!

So we had ideas about making svn:externals actually work in two
different ways, I am just doing a quick braindump here.

1. invoke svn checkout / update / etc when encounter svn:externals.

2. use view to construct the structure.  This is more complicated,
because views are designed to know how the whole layout is like, and
creates a "root" objects that most of the svk commands already know
how to work with.  However svn:externals are more like lazily
populated layout changes, and it's probably infeasible to scan for
externals the tree and construct the layout when people want to enable
the feature.  Though lazily populate externals as additional paths
inside a mutable root might be an exercise for hacking.  Also, we will
need to have the external paths mirrored in svk to manage it, and we
can probably pop out and ask users to initialize new url mirrors when
encountered.

Perhaps using the local one in view when it's already mirrored, and
invoke svn when we don't could be a good idea.

Now, any taker? :)

Cheers,
CLK