SVK and svn:externals for plugins

Rails
1

Hi there.

I’m working with svk [1] for the first time (so I can work offline for
certain periods of time) and have a problem with the plugin script
because it just supports svn, not svk.

I want to install a plugin with svn:externals but don’t know how to o
it or if it’s somehow posible.

I know some well known rails developers use svk so I’d like to know
how they/you manage it considering rails’s strong preference for svn.

Thank you.
Diego

2

On Feb 18, 2007, at 10:13 PM, diegal wrote:

how they/you manage it considering rails’s strong preference for svn.

Thank you.
Diego

Diego,

svk doesn’t support svn:externals

You can manually do the ‘svk add …’ for all the new resources, but
I just had the (completely untested) thought that you could put a
symlink from a ‘svn’ early in your PATH to the svk executable. The
command that rails uses “svn add -N #{file}” has arguments that match
svk (similarly for “revert” and “rm”). If you only use svk, you
might be able to put such an svn->svk trick in your PATH
permanently. (Remember, I said this was untested!)

Unless you’re using the (b)leading edge of a plugin, you probably
need to cut the svn:external off in favor of a copy of the plugin(s)
at a particular point in time prior to going into production anyway.
My solution has just been to manually add resources (sometimes with
something like svk status | ruby -alne 'if $_ =~ %r{^\?} then puts $F [1..-1] end' | xargs svk add to add everything not already known).

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

3

On 19 feb, 12:36, Rob B. [email protected] wrote:

You can manually do the ‘svkadd …’ for all the new resources, but
I just had the (completely untested) thought that you could put a
symlink from a ‘svn’ early in your PATH to thesvkexecutable. The
command that rails uses “svn add -N #{file}” has arguments that match svk(similarly for “revert” and “rm”). If you only usesvk, you
might be able to put such an svn->svktrick in your PATH
permanently. (Remember, I said this was untested!)

mmm… maybe something like this could be done… I’ll keep that to
try sometime.

For now, I just temporarily abandoned svk in favor of svn (knowing I
can’t commit until being online). I’ll retry using it in a few days.

Unless you’re using the (b)leading edge of a plugin, you probably
need to cut the svn:external off in favor of a copy of the plugin(s)
at a particular point in time prior to going into production anyway.
My solution has just been to manually add resources (sometimes with
something like svkstatus | ruby -alne 'if $_ =~ %r{^\?} then puts $F [1..-1] end' | xargssvkadd to add everything not already known).

Jeje. I did something similar based on the svn_conf generated
svn.rake.

This is my lib/tasks/svk.rake

namespace :svk do

desc “Add all new files to subversion”
task :add do
system “svk status | grep ‘^?’ | sed -e ‘s/? *//’ | sed -e ‘s/ /
\ /g’ | xargs svk add”
end

end

Thank you
Diego

4

Nope. Still doesn’t work. svk just doesn’t know anything about the
svn:externals property. It means nothing more than if you put a
“color” property on a directory.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

5

Too bad that doesn’t work. However, I’d suggest you use piston to
manage your plugins. It makes updates faster because it doesn’t hit
external repo’s on every update. Also, and more importantly IMO, it
only updates the plugin source when you want it to instead of every
update between your local sandbox and the repo. Unless you really
need to be on a plugins bleeding edge, I think it’s better to just
have piston checkout out the revision of the plugin you need and only
update it when you need a bug fix or new functionality. Otherwise,
when you’re constantly updating the plugin source with svn:external,
you will be fighting intermittent errors when the plugin is changed
and your code ‘breaks’ even though you changed nothing.

Alex

On Feb 20, 7:54 am, Rob B. [email protected]

6

I haven’t tried this, but could you ‘initially’ svn:external the
plugin into the subversion repository. Then after you mirror the repo
with svk, will sync’ing your mirror with the repo pull the externals
into your local mirror from that point on?

7

[email protected] wrote:

and your code ‘breaks’ even though you changed nothing.
The same strategy works very well with SVK - you mirror the plugin repo,
checkout the version you need, copy it in your app and check it in. When
you
want to update to new version of the plugin, repeat the procedure (or
better,
write a Rake task to do it for you).

–
Sava C.