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On this page in the Subversion manual, it says that "When you commit a change to the svn:externals property, Subversion will synchronize the checked-out items against the changed externals definition when you next run svn update. The same thing will happen when others update their working copies and receive your changes to the externals definition."

If you have not specified a revision number for the external, I assume the HEAD revision is used. So, will the subdir managed by the external property update to its HEAD revision each and every time 'svn update' is run against the parent working copy?

Marcus
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  • Since the answer to this question is 'Yes', here's how to *prevent* your externals from being updated when updating the parent working copy: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/172018/when-updating-a-whole-projects-root-how-to-exclude-svn-externals-from-being-upd – Marcus Dec 17 '08 at 14:39
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    _"If you have not specified a revision number for the external"_ **Always** specify a revision number if you're pointing to trunk or to a branch. Always. The only time you should omit the revision number is: (a) You're referring to a tag, or (b) special circumstances like bringing in a tool that relates the current location of some external resource. Any other circumstance, you're poisoning your repository for all time. Having been struck by an instance of this left by an ex-colleague, I can't stress its importance enough. – Lightness Races in Orbit Nov 21 '17 at 16:58
  • You make an excellent point. If externals are pointing to trunk, then the only way to assure the code doesn't change is to provide the revision numbers desired for those externals. That's if you desire to return to working code at every revision. – Marcus Nov 21 '17 at 19:32
  • Yep, exactly so. I thought I'd cleaned up every instance years ago but I'd missed one, and it was in a library, so there is now a chunk of our repository that we can never ever touch at all whatsoever, because it will automatically affect old tags of things that use it ^_^ – Lightness Races in Orbit Nov 21 '17 at 19:57
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    Actually I think in the end I violated the "never commit to tags" rule (by adding a revision to the problematic external), on the principle that I was helping to maintain the integrity of the snapshot, rather than breaking it. So, you see, sometimes two wrongs do make a right :P – Lightness Races in Orbit Nov 21 '17 at 20:09

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Yes, it will be updated as well, that is the main purpose here :)

Keltia
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