Creating symbolic links to branches in SVN?

Question

I'd like to create a symlink to a directory in SVN, eg. if I have

  branches/week-1/
  branches/week-2/
  ...
  branches/week-n/

and I'd like a directory,

  branches/current -> branches/week-n

that I can keep pointing to the latest n (by manually updating it). Is that possible? If possible, I'd want to avoid checking out our entire repository, since it's huuuge.

Answer 1

You can use svn externals property to create 'shortcuts'. Although it sounds like you aren't using svn switching which you should be.

Doing an svn switch will be able to change between branches that you have with only the changed files.

Typically you have just one folder:

C:\projects\myproject

And that folder has some branch checked out into it.

Then you do an svn switch into the other branch you'd like to go to.

It also sounds like you might have something backwards with how you are working with svn. You can create weekly tags if you'd like like and do all of your development out of the trunk.

Answer 2

From the Subversion FAQ:

Subversion 1.1 (and later) has the ability to put a symlink under version control, via the usual svn add command.

Details: the Subversion repository has no internal concept of a symlink. It stores a "versioned symlink" as an ordinary file with an 'svn:special' property attached. The svn client (on unix) sees the property and translates the file into a symlink in the working copy. Win32 has no symlinks, so a win32 client won't do any such translation: the object appears as a normal file.