Subversion is a bit lacking on the merging and branching front in comparison with some of the newer distributed version control systems, but it does make working with large projects easy. The single biggest reason for this is sparse checkouts.
At work we have a source tree that contains artwork, documentation, the source for all the third party libraries we use and compiled versions of these for multiple architectures and platforms (32bit, 64bit, windows, RHEL4, RHEL5 etc). This makes the full checkout rather large and there are many times when you only need a small fraction of all the files.
The problem with sparse checkouts is that it can become very laborious manually setting one up for anything beyond a few directories. For more details on the basics see here. As with many tedious tasks – computers can help!
I put together a little script for helping with this – get it here. I hope it’s useful and keep reading for more details on how it works.
In Action
The final version of the script makes doing a sparse checkout as simple as doing an standard checkout:
./checkout.rb svn://server/trunk
To checkout using a named subset of files:
./checkout.rb --map documentation svn://server/trunk
To checkout using a locally defined subset of files (rather than a subset stored on the sever):
./checkout.rb --map local.yaml svn://server/trunk