SVN: Ignore externals when committing

Question

Is it possible to ignore the commit of externals in SVN?

Example:

I have a project and one of the subfolders is an external:

svn:externals
my_remote_folder http://svn.whatever.org/blah/trunk/

This works seamlessly. Always when I perform an update, the externals get updated as well.

But when I change anything in the local checkout of this external my IDE recognizes the change and offers me the file to commit. But maybe I have just read-access to the external SVN.

I tried to ignore the folder conventionally:

svn:ignore
my_remote_folder

I also tried

my_remote_folder .

But my IDE (PhpStorm) and also TortoiseSVN still ignore this ignore.

Answer 1

The answer highly depends on which client you use.

• Command Line Client: by default, the command line client does not include externals during commits. From the SVN book:

  [...] if you want to commit changes that you've made in one or more of those external working copies, you must run svn commit explicitly on those working copies — committing on the primary working copy will not recurse into any external ones.

• TortoiseSVN: In the commit dialogue, you can easily deselect files from externals:

• PhpStorm: I cannot tell here, since I don't know the IDE personally.