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

[Tim Van Holder]

On 6 November 2014 16:46, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> 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.