svn external warning for Sakai

I just did something seemingly innocent that ended up loosing a lot  
of work.  I'm not quite sure what happened, but perhaps it will  
become more clear when I explain it.  I think that this is something  
we need to watch out for.

I checked out the sakai/trunk.  This had an older version of the site  
module.

Since I was working on the site module, I deleted the site files  
locally and checked out svn/site/trunk site.  Now I have the latest  
in-progress site files in-place with the sakai 2.2. code.

After *much* work, and *many* changes made to site files, I was  
getting ready to check in - but I wanted to make sure all was well  
against the latest code - so I ran this command from my dev folder:

svn update

Usually, this is a great thing to do, as it updates all the code you  
have, leaving your changes alone.  But in this case, when it got to  
the site files, it wiped out most of my work.  This is because it was  
updating the site module from the externals definition, which was a  
different state of the repo. than I had actually checked out in the  
site folder.

I'm not quite sure what it did, but it seemed to revert most of the  
files to the previous version, and deleted much of my new work.  It  
happened so fast...

I think the same thing could happen if you have a branch of your  
project that you are working on, and you, like I did, place it among  
the Sakai 2.2 files.  This again sets up a condition where update  
from the root will use the externals definition, but your files are  
from some other part (another branch) of the repo.

If I had done an update from site, it would have been fine.  I think  
the problem was that I did it from the root.

This is not a problem if  you are working on the trunk of your  
project - then update and status work great from the root.

So, if you have a module that is not part of the svn:externals of the  
distribution, but have the files in the distribution, and if the  
distribution might think that your files belong to it... watch out.

- Glenn

Glenn R. Golden
Software Architect, University Of Michigan
ggolden@xxxxxxxxx



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