What happens when SVN can no longer access the url in svn:externals

Question

Say I have a repository like this:

trunk/
   src/
   lib/
      somelib

Somelib is linked to specific revision of a subversion repository beyond my control, at http://some.svn.url.com/trunk.

What happens if http://some.svn.url.com/trunk disappears from the internet? Will a clean checkout of the repository be missing this dependency? Or will the SVN server send the last available copy?

Is there some way of linking to an external repository but making a local cache (on the SVN server), so that if the original repository can no longer be reached the files are still available?

Answer 1

If the repository disappears from the Internet, your clean checkout will be missing the dependency. What in effect happens when you use svn:externals is that you are merely automatically telling the Subversion client to also perform a checkout/update of the given repository. It is no different than if you had done it manually.

One alternative that you could use is to run svnsync to mirror the remote repository into a local one, and then change your externals to point to the mirror. Check the Subversion book for details on svnsync.