How to configure svn to cloak some directories?

Question

There is a nice feature in TFS called cloaking. In this feature, a developer can can determine which folders NOT to be copied in the working folder while checking out the sources. Can Svn support such a thing or not?

Answer 1

You can use permissions to hide parts of the repository from certain people, but as far as working copy configuration, no SVN doesn't support anything like that.

Answer 2

Old question but I found this to work: (as found on http://svn.haxx.se/tsvnusers/archive-2006-06/0020.shtml)

Just switch each directory to svn://server/empty, like this:

for i in boring* dull stupid etc 
do svn switch svn://server/empty $i 
done

This will delete all the versioned files in those directories, and thenceforth, doing "svn up" will not bring them back. To bring them back, just switch them back to where they were originally:

for i in boring* dull stupid etc 
do svn switch svn://server/trunk/$i $i 
done