Subject: Re: bug#18975: 24.4; vc-svn does not recognize file externals as svn-managed files

From: Tim Van Holder <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2014 19:44:03 +0100

On 6 November 2014 16:46, Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > I added a file external to an SVN tree.
>
> I haven't used SVN is many years and have never had to use its externals
> support, so I'm not really sure exactly what it does and even less how
> it should be supported in VC.
>

SVN has two types of externals (both set via svn:externals properties on
directories).
Regular externals (supported for a very long time) pull in external SVN
trees inside your checkout. Because they get their own .svn root, vc-svn
handles these just fine.
File externals (added more recently; in 1.7 I think) allow you to pull in a
single file from elsewhere in your repository; sort of the SVN equivalent
of a hard link.
It is these files that vc-svn does not recognize as svn-controlled right
now.

> resolves my issue, but I can't be sure it doesn't cause problems
> > elsewhere.
>
> Hopefully someone else knows better, but otherwise I suggest you try to
> use this change for a while, testing it with things like
> diff/annotate/younameit.
>
> And then report here if you really think that works better.
>

Well it makes vc-svn recognize the files as svn-controlled, so it
definitely works better :-)
I'll see about putting a fixed version in a private load path, so that if
it breaks something it doesn't affect all users.