How can I do a reversed svn ignore

Question

I have a repository with lots of good stuff in it. I want to keep all of that stuff in the repo, but I want to ignore a few files and folders when retrieving.

The way I understand ignoring files and folders with svn is that it will ignore my local files, so they don't get checked in. I want the opposite. I want to ignore some of the files that are allready in the repository.

Why? Cause our build process makes use of certain files, but for debugging we use other files, and I don't want to confuse my IDE by having several versions of our library.

Answer 1

With svn you can choose to check out only certain subfolders instead of the whole project, but other than that you don't have much control over selectively checking out just certain files. You're correct that setting the ignore property is intended more to avoid having local files checked in, especially things like log files, build artifacts and other 'temporary' or routinely regenerated files.

I think you might need to find a different approach to managing these files, possibly better use of your IDE or switching IDE's entirely. This isn't the class of problem that source control software is designed to solve.