Subversion documentation

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Friday, December 15, 2006 8:00 PM +0800 Qi Bei 
<boostpy2005 at yahoo.com.cn> wrote:

> em, there is no file share concept, I think. Though, you can share
> directorys thru svn:externals

I believe that question was meant to be semi-ironic.

VSS users get used to using shared files as a way to get around Windows' 
lack of hard and symbolic links. (It turns out that NTFS has support for 
them, but there's no UI to create them. I know hard links are there, but I 
don't know if it has symbolic links.) Links are indeed a handy thing, and 
it sucks that you have to hack them with VSS instead of getting them 
natively in the OS.

Recent versions of SVN do support versioning of symbolic links, using a 
property. But it does you no good if your OS can't make use of them.

As you say, you can emulate sharing at the directory level through 
svn:externals. How useful that is to you depends on your use case. You 
probably have to change your work practices to leverage that, moving your 
shared files into a separate subdirectory.