The goal was to change an external reference and make it a part of the repository. So from this:
repo \-foo -> external: https://....
To this:
repo \-foo (included in repo directly)
The procedure for this would be:
- Removing the externals reference
repo$ svn pd svn:externals .
- Adding the content
svn add foo
- And committing it
svn ci -m 'Include foo in repo instead of external reference'
However there’s actually an additional step needed after step 1: committing the removal of the externals definition. Otherwise the working copy can get corrupted. I managed to get the working copy in a reasonable state except the foo directory was still recognised as an external.
As it turns out the list of externals in a working copy is stored in .svn/wc.db. Since the update around the removal of the externals reference failed halfway the entries from this database were not removed. Luckily it’s a standard, sqlite database so using the sqlite3 tool it’s possible to remove entries from the EXTERNALS table.
repo$ sqlite3 .svn/wc.db SQLite version 3.8.2 2013-12-06 14:53:30 Enter ".help" for instructions Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";" sqlite> .tables ACTUAL_NODE NODES PRISTINE WC_LOCK EXTERNALS NODES_BASE REPOSITORY WORK_QUEUE LOCK NODES_CURRENT WCROOT sqlite> select * from EXTERNALS; 1|foo||2|normal|dir|||| sqlite> delete from externals where local_relpath = 'foo'; sqlite> .quit repo$
So far it seems that it didn’t do any damage.
Of course if the working copy is small and clean then checking it out might be a simpler and faster solution. In my case it was a 20G working copy so I was trying to find a way around it.