SVN externals sub folder changes not showing in view log (tortoise svn)

Question

SVN externals allow you to make an SVN folder appear as if it's at another location. A good use for this is having a common folder shared across all of your projects in SVN.

I have a /trunk/common folder in SVN that I share via several different project.

Example:

• Project1 : /trunk/project1/depends
• Project2 : /trunk/project2/depends
• Project3 : /trunk/project3/depends
• Project4 : /trunk/project4/depends

Each of these depends folders are empty, but have an svn:external defined to point to my /trunk/common folder.

The problem is when I view log within any of the projects: /trunk/projectX/ it does not show changes from the svn:externals. I am using tortoise SVN as my SVN client.

Does anyone know how to change this behavior? I would like for the show log of /trunk/projectX to include any changes to any defined svn:externals as well.

Answer 1

This is not possible with the current release of Subversion, other than explicitly calling svn log on the target of the externals directory

You can try issueing a feature request at the Subversion website

Answer 2

When you display the log for a local versioned folder, it will show the changes that are relative to this particular folder. Externals are only a link to a different folder on the repository. The only thing you can track about external references, from a folder which depends on this external project, is the reference definition itself. That is because the reference is a subversion property of the dependent folder.

Imagine you have the following repo hierarchy :

repo
   myfirstproject
      trunk
   mysecondproject
      trunk
   mycommonlib
      trunk

and that mysecondproject\trunk folder has the following svn:external property :

svn://mysrv/repo/mysharedlib@2451 sharedlib

A checkout of mysecondproject\trunk inside a new folder secondproject will create something like this on your file system :

secondproject Folder (refers mysecondproject/trunk)
   sharedlib Folder (refers mycommonlib/trunk @ revision #2451)

Calling "Show log" command of Tortoise from secondproject folder will only show secondproject files changes, and eventually changes that occurred on the svn:external property of the folder.

To get change log of the external project, you need to call "Show log" from the inner folder sharedlib, which makes sense.