Subversion's svn:externals

I know everyone else is already doing it, but I've only just got around to working out how svn externals works and why it's quite cool.

I've got a Zend Framework application that I'm working on in subversion and it has a lib directory which contains a zf directory. The zf directory is a checkout of the latest trunk version of the framework. Up to to now, I've been doing this manually.

Today I sat down for all of 10 mins and sorted out subversion's svn:externals functionality to make it do the legwork. It's dead easy.

Command line:

cd lib
svn propedit svn:externals .

(Don't forget to ensure that the EDITOR environment variable is set!)

I then added

zf http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/trunk

in the editor (a file called svn-prop.tmp, apparently) and saved and closed the editor.

All that's required now is an svn update to automatically pull in the Zend Framework code automatically for me.

By the way, you have to do a svn commit to actually commit the propedit change too.

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