So you have an external library foo version 1.0 that you have committed to your Subversion repository together with your code. Let us for simplicity say that your external library is situated in its own folder.
One day you realize that there is a new version 2.0 of foo released. You download it and since there was a while ago a lot of the file structure in the foo project has changed. How can you replace the files in your current repository in a good looking fashion?
Now you could remove the old foo-library. Commit, and import the new version of foo. But for me I always think it’s important that a commit is correctly reflecting a change. And I would say that upgrading the foo library should be done in ONE commit. How do you do this? It turns out it’s a pretty hard problem and something that does not exist in todays Subversion.
I solved this by running rsync from the new library folder to the old
library folder, ignoring the .svn-folders:
$ rsync -vlr --exclude=.svn --delete foo_new/ foo_old/
Executing
$ svn status
then gave a me a list of all newly added files (question marks), removed files (conflicts/exclamation marks) and changed files (M, as in modified). The added files and removed files then manually had to be added/removed in my local checkout before committing - something that could have been scripted if I wasn’t doing this at 2:30 in the morning :-)
Please comment if you do have a better solution.