[Zope-dev] Subversion externals versus mirroring

[Wichert Akkerman]

On 9/15/09 10:33 , Reinout van Rees wrote:
> On 2009-09-11, Sebastien Douche<sdouche at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> Caution with the actual workflow, 2 differences between SVN and Hg :
>> - you cannot check out partial repository
>> - external does not exist
>
> Missing externals has been a pain point for me.
>
> There are however buildout recipes that can pull in "externals" for you from
> buildout.  infrae.subversion does it (and can turn the downloaded stuff into a
> development egg at the same time), Balasz Ree has a bzr recipe.  I'm betting
> there's a mercurial one, also (and otherwise I'll build one if needed) :-)

And mr.developer can handle them all. This only solves the problem 
partially though: most of my projects use svn externals to pull in CSS, 
javascript and other resources from an external prototype. That is not 
supported by those zc.buildout recipes: they can only checkout a whole 
package.

In my experience distributed SCMs add bottlenecks to development that we 
currently do not have in the Zope community: with both our shared svn 
repository and distributed SCMs everyone can branch everything, but with 
distributed SCMs you have to ask a maintainer to merge any changes, 
something everyone can do directly right now. For that reason I am still 
-1 on switching to git/bzr/hg/etc.

Wichert.