Find paths with svn: external properties with a specific string?

Question

I have a very large subversion repository, it has a size of about 7 GB and contains many files and directories from different projects.

Now I have made some significant change in one project structure, which is actually a library, and I use it in a number of other projects in one repository. Now the documentation is sparse and I don’t know which project really used this library as external, and I would like to somehow request the subversion server / repository to return me all directories that have a specific line in the svn: export property, so that I can customize them.

Ideally, without checking the entire repository, it will be problematic because of all the branches and tags.

Is this possible in any reasonable way?

THX

Answer 1

A quick and dirty way, if these are just a few changes, is to use svn propget with the --recursive flag to get properties and make changes manually (it may take some time to return):

svn propget --recursive svn:externals http://your.svn.server/ | grep -B 5 

To do this in a more automated way, you can script it:

• fetch svn recursively: external for each path in the root directory

• check directories whose external elements contain the string you are looking for (you can split the path component into a file system separator and check each component with depth = immediate if you want to be really selective about what you are checking)

• make and commit a change

The advantage of this method is that, since your control effectively reflects your repository (even if it does not have enough downloads), you can make one fix at the top level with all the changes made.

NTN.