SVN checkout filtered by file extension?

Question

I have a home-grown automated build script in the form of a DOS batch file. In part of that script, I check out (with "svn checkout") a section of our SVN repository that includes a bunch of third-party stuff that's used in our projects. This batch file performed pretty well for a long time, but now people have checked in lots of fluff (docs, sample code, etc.) into the third-party area and the checkout part of this script has gotten lots slower. I'd like to mitigate this by checking out only the stuff we need -- mostly dll files in our case. So, my question is this: what's the best way to check out an SVN repository filtered by file extension?

I didn't see any obvious way to do this in the svn help. I have a .NET utility library that wraps svn.exe in some ways, and I was thinking of extending this to retrieve only content that matched my extensions of interest. But I'd prefer to use an easier or existing method if one exists.

Answer 1

This is possible: you can svn checkout an empty directory, and then svn update filename for each file that you do want.

Your script can do something like:

1. svn checkout svn://path/to/repos/directory --depth empty
2. svn list --recursive svn://path/to/repos/directory
3. Pipe that result through a filter that removes the forbidden file extensions, e.g. grep
4. Iterate over this new filtered list and svn update --parents each file

That would give your desired result of a working copy without certain files or file extensions.

Of course, there is also the issue that you mention of “people [checking] in lots of fluff” but that’s a separate matter.

Answer 2

As I told here, there is only one option build into SVN itself: A new feature in SVN 1.5 called sparse checkout, however you can only select checkout on directory level, so you have to sort the files you do not need in a different directory.