Question

So let’s say I have a code checkout that I used --ignore-externals on originally. One of the directories has several large externals in it.

After having checked out my sparse copy, is there a way to retrieve just one of those externals? As far as I can tell, all I can do is svn up . and retrieve all the externals at once. --depth doesn’t seem to work in this case, nor does svn up external_dir/ since it doesn’t exist yet. I even tried faking it with mkdir external_dir/; svn up external_dir/, although I didn’t really expect that one to work.

So, is it possible to retrieve/update only one external, rather than everything in the directory, if it was originally ignored?

Answer 1

So here’s what I ended up doing: Alter the externals so only the one I want is listed, update, and revert.

svn propset svn:externals "$(svn propget svn:externals . | grep external_foo)" .
svn up .
svn revert .

Don’t forget the various periods that specify “current directory”.