Re: [boost] [sandbox] SVN externals, and large subdirs.

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-26 10:30:48

on Thu May 24 2007, Rene Rivera <grafikrobot-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> Douglas Gregor wrote:
>> On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 22:52 -0500, Rene Rivera wrote:
>>> Troy, Doug, and others,
>>>
>>> I just moved the boost/sandbox/troy subdir to 
>>> boost/sandbox-branches/troy. This was to fix two problems:
>> 
>> Ouch. Some warning would have been nice...
>
> Sorry about that... But I had various users, and myself, being unable to 
> use the sandbox.
>
>>> b) It's a very large tree containing multiple "copies" of the 1.34.0 
>>> sources. I know copies are a "cheap" operation on SVN, but they are not 
>>> cheap operations on users hard drives. (In my personal case svn ends up 
>>> having memory failures as it tries to do the checkout, and leads to 
>>> corrupt partial checkouts, and corrupt a file system.)
>> 
>> Yeah, we've become accustomed to checking out the whole sandbox.
>
> It's not a question of adaptation. Many people checkout the top level 
> sandbox dir, myself included, so that they can tell when people add new 
> projects.

IMO that's not the way to deal with it.  If you want notifications we
should set up an RSS feed or just a mailing list based on the
post-commit hook.

>>> My suggestion is to restrict to putting library projects only in the 
>>> boost/sandbox dir. 
>> 
>> And, eventually, moving those projects under
>> sandbox/projects/projectname.
>
> Yep... and more projects are doing that. And I've done some minor 
> cleanup in there, and I'll probably do some more :-)
>
>>> And under no circumstances use externals. They just 
>>> don't seem to work as one might expect.
>> 
>> Interesting.
>
> Perhaps that was a bit extreme :-) But my feelings for svn are
> probably seeping through. Sorry.

Well, Troy has been using externals very effectively; you just need an
appropriate project organization.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com