Question

The problem is pretty straightforward, I’m just not very well-versed in these tools (or CVSes in general).

Each branch of the project contains 4 folders:

branch-1
    folder1
    ...
    folder4
branch-2
    folder1
    ...
    folder4
...

folder4 is ginormous (~2GB), contains things I’m usually not interested in, and I’d rather not download it every single time — it takes forever, and takes up space.

I see that the “Checkout from SVN” dialog has a Depth field, with options:

1. Fully recursive
2. Immediate children, including folders
3. Only file children
4. Only this item

None of these options is quite what I want. 1 and 2 will still download folder4, while 3 and 4 will omit everything.

Ideally, I’d be able to simply omit folder4 from the download initially, with the option to pull it down later. I don’t mind seeing it as an incoming change (and simply ignoring it) during sync operations.

Any ideas? Am I missing something?

P.S. I tried to post this question in Super User, but the site is giving me real problems.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do this using Subclipse:

1. Check out using the “Immediate children” option. folder1, etc. will be empty.
2. Select the empty folders (except folder4) in the newly-checked out project.
3. Choose Team → Update to Version…
4. Set the depth to “Fully recursive”.
5. Tick “Change working copy to specified depth”.
6. Click OK.

Another way to do this involves the svn command line client:

1. Check out using the “Only this item” option. The top-level directory will be empty (folder1 etc. will be missing).
2. cd project-dir
3. svn up folder1 folder2 folder3