How to correctly set an external path on SVN?

Question

I'm trying to set an external path on SVN. Here is what I do in SVN:

1. Right click on folder where I want an external
2. Select "Show Properties"
3. New -> Externals
4. In "Externals", I click New

5. At local path, I tried setting the path I wanted, but whatever I set, when I update the files, it adds the path I wrote to the folder which I added the external. For example my folder on SVN is "Externals". If I set Local path to ^/trunk/external, when I'll commit it tries to fetch files from (all the long path before)/Externals/^/trunk/Externals. How do I tell it that the local path is the current directory? If I set nothing, it complains, if I set ./ it complains...

6. For the URL where to fetch files from, it sometimes works when I set a file, but not a folder?

Note: I used this site but unfortunately, the part where I have trouble just says:

To add a new external, click the New... and then fill in the required information in the shown dialog.

I read the tips afters but they don't help... If someone has a concrete example it would help a lot.

Answer 1

This is the dialog from TortoiseSVN that you're having difficulties with:

Here, Local Path refers to the file or folder relative to the folder that has this externals property set on it. So, if I had a folder at ^/trunk/Externals that I wanted to exist here as well, I'd set it up as follows:

• Local Path: Externals (note that it must not exist in the current directory; it will be created)
• URL: ^/trunk/Externals

This is setting a property (as you can see from the title bar) on the folder C:\Sources\Ops. The result is that updating C:\Sources\Ops will pull the contents of the ^/trunk/Externals folder in SVN into C:\Sources\Ops\Externals.