Question

I’d like to introduce branching/merging using our existing (and exclusive) trunk (which is huge). Here’s an example:

trunk
    folderA
        folderA1
            folderA1a
        folderA2
    folderB
    folderC
    ...
    folderZ
        folderZ1
            folderZ1a
    libraries

branches

The goal would be to to have these paths as a branch:

• trunk/folderA/folderA1/folderA1a
• trunk/folderZ/folderZ1/folderZ1a
• trunk/libraries

So far, I’ve done the following:

1. I did a checkout of trunk using the dept “Immediate children, including folders”. This only shows me branches, tags and trunk
2. I updated folderA1a, folderZ1a and libraries trees from trunk to my working copy. Now I have these 3 full trees in my working copy
3. From my working copy, I ran the following command: svn copy trunk branches/mynewbranch
4. I committed my changes

However, when I browse the repository, mynewbranch contains a mirror copy of trunk’s structure instead of just the few trees I had updated. Is it even possible to create a branch from a partial tree of trunk?

Edit #1

I went into the trunk folder and ran the following command:

svn copy . <path_of_branch>

If I look at my working copy, the branch only contains what I need. Which is good.

However, when I commit these changes, all the folders that I excluded originally are present when browsing the repository. When I checkout the branch in question, the unwanted folders are also present.

Answer 1

Try this at step 3…

svn copy . <path_of_branch>

Here . means your working copy will be created as branch which is I believe what you are trying to do.