Akra’s DevNotes

Subversion's svn:externals property is the mechanism that is used to automatically check out data from other repositories into your working directory. This post is to remind me how to do it as each time I need the information, I end up Googling for it.

To start, let's assume you have a lib/ directory and want to put ZF's library/ and incubator/library/ code within it so that the result looks like this:

myApplication/
	lib/
		incubator/Zend/
		Zend/

This is what you do:

$ cd lib/
$ export SVN_EDITOR=vim
$ svn propedit svn:externals .

(Change vim to your own choice of editor as required!)

Vim now starts up and you need the following lines:

incubator http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/branch/release-1.0/incubator/library
Zend http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/branch/release-1.0/library/Zend

Note that release-1.0 is the current released version of Zend Framework and release-1.5 will be the next one. The ongoing development work for 1.5 is being done on release-1.5PR.

Save and exit from vim and you will see this message:

Set new value for property 'svn:externals' on '.'

That's it! Don't forget to commit and then you can run svn up to keep your copy of the Zend Framework up to date.

I'm not sure how many people follow my the Zend Framework in Action website yet, so I thought I'd advertise here that I've just posted about my upcoming session at the UK PHP Conference.

Go and read it and then subscribe to the RSS feed!

I don't often post links to articles I read via my RSS reader as I assume that most people who read this blog also read sites like Planet PHP, PHP Developer or DevZone.

Having said that, Etienne Kneuss has posted an article aimed at less experienced PHP programmers providing some quick guidelines to code cleanliness which are actually a very good reminder to us all.

I thought I'd start a new website to talk about all things Zend Framework, so I'm introducing www.zendframeworkbook.com to the world.

The intention is to highlight interesting things that I see on the Zend Framework mailing lists and also to talk about book stuff periodically as well.

Obviously, if you follow the ZF mailing lists religiously, then you may find that you recognise the content of a lot of the posts, but if not, then it may turn into a useful summary of some of the main issues that are happening in Zend Framework land.