Mix repositories with SVN

Question

I am developing a web application in PHP with the framework symphony (1.4). The code is versioned using SVN. In this web app, there is a common base shared by all of our customers, and some extra-functionalities created specifically for each customer. Those specifics are in files / folders anywhere inside the project’s code. What we are trying to do here is to have different repositories that we can mix easily:

• One for the common base. When we want to work on it, we can checkout this repository, do whatever we have to and commit… So, SVN :)
• One for each customer. And that’s where it’s tricky… When we have to work on specific customer code, we would like to checkout the common base and the customer repositories inside the same folder, do whatever we have to do, commit only the specific code, which I remind you is spread inside different folders / files inside the project.

I have already looked around and I found different things like the svn property external or the svnadmin sub-command dump. But I did not found anything that seems to be really appropriate to my needs. So before I start working on a shell script to do this and potentially mess up my projects, my questions are :

• Have you ever face that kind of issue
• How do you manage specific code inside your projects

Answer 1

Create several branches, one for your base functionality and one for every customer. You can use svn:external within you repository to link to your base functionality files.