Using Subversion externals for files

I needed to use Subversion externals property to define a reference to a file. Based on this blog, here are my notes:

Let’s say that you want to have Subversion to use the following file from another directory: https://mysvnserver.com/svn/shared/lib/thelib.jar

And have the file download into the following file in your project: myproject/lib/thelib.jar You should have lib directory already exist.

Within your myproject folder, create a text file. This is necessary if you plan to have multiple references.

$ cat > svn_externals_config.txt
lib/thelib.jar https://mysvnserver.com/svn/shared/lib/thelib.jar

Use Ctrl-D to exit the data entry mode. Alternatively, you can use your favourite text editor to create the text file.

If you want to reference a folder instead, you can have the following definition:

lib/aThirdPartyLibFolder https://mysvnserver.com/svn/shared/lib/aThirdPartyLibFolder

Make sure that the local lib folder doesn’t have aThirdPartyLibFolder or you may get the following error: svn: warning: Working copy 'aThirdPartyLibFolder' locked.

Now you can set the svn:externals property by running the following lines:

svn propset svn:externals . -F svn_externals_config.txt
svn update

Once you are set, you can commit the externals definition by running the following command:

svn commit --depth empty . -m "Modify svn externals definition only."

Web development reference material

Here are some useful cheat sheets for web developers

Tagcloud widget

Thanks to Jonathan L. for the suggestion to check out this tagcloud widget. It’s interesting that someone would write a widget for this. I wrote a basic tag cloud before with simple scaling arithmetic to render tags in different font sizes. This widget adds a few more features. The extra features also add significant weight to the page footprint. So, some weeding work might be necessary to eliminate extra unneeded features.