Subversion externals problem

Question

I am new to SVN and make heavy use of the externals property. I have a repository located on my PC and the externals properties have a hardcoded 'localhost' in the name, which is now giving me problems. For example:

/project1/trunk
/shared/trunk

project1/trunk depends on the shared folder so has an svn:externals property of svn://localhost/shared/trunk. This works fine with TortoiseSVN and I can checkout project1/trunk and am given a copy of shared/trunk.

Now I have moved the repository to another server and the externals links no longer work for obvious reasons (TortoiseSVN is trying to checkout out svn://localhost/shared/trunk which no longer exists).

So I need to update all my externals - but I don't want to hardcode any machine names - so how do I make this work? Bear in mind that the repository may move again at some point. Digging around the SVN manuals I came across the ^/ syntax, so I tried the following:

svn:externals shared ^/shared/trunk

This was accepted but when I try and checkout a copy of project1 on my PC I get the following error:

Unrecognized format for the relative external URL 'shared'.
Check the path and/or URL you've entered.

Unless I hardcode the repository machine name in the externals I can't make this work - it seems like a black art so any advice would be welcome.

Answer 1

The ^/ syntax you refer to is new in SVN 1.5, so you may be using an older version of the client and/or server that doesn't understand that syntax. Also, in order to support the new externals syntax in 1.5, they changed the order of the paramters in the externals definition. I think you want the path first, then the folder name for it to appear under. The details are in the docs.