Change depth in existing SVN working copy without redownloading

Question

I have a working copy of an entire SVN repository, but I want to change it into a sparse working copy because of disk space issues.

One way to do this would be:

Answer 1

Nothing like reviving an old SO Question.

I have been working with a very similar problem where I branch from trunk to create a release package but due to limitations I have to clone files which are only intended for dev.

asset
└── js
    └── some
        └── directories
            ├── assets
            │   ├── files ...
            ├── dev       **<------------ This folder needs to be empty**
            │   ├── apis
            │   ├── campaign
            │   ├── features
            │   ├── modules
            │   ├── main.js
            │   └── tags
            └── release
                ├── apis
                ├── data
                ├── features
                ├── modules
                ├── main.js
                └── tags

I decided that I would exclude the dev files to remove the temptation to patch a fix in the release branch in the wrong directory.

I do a lot of sparse checkouts to avoid large folders in trunk but have never done it retrospectively on a working copy. It seems this is pretty straight forward.

To modify the working copy so that asset/js/some/directories/devis empty you can simply run the svn co command again on the working copy.

In my case the following works

svn co --depth empty ^/branches/releases/latest/asset/js/some/directories/dev \
asset/js/some/directories/dev

You are basically running a partial checkout on your pre-existing working copy and this will work at any level. In the original case you would simply run the following.

svn co --depth immediates ^/branches/mybranch/projects projects
svn co --depth immediates ^/branches/mybranch/project1 project1
svn co --depth immediates ^/branches/mybranch/project2 project2

For those that don't know the caret ^ is shorthand for the repository root so it works like a relative path on your repository a little like ../some/location.

The key here is that you are not creating a new working copy to fix your problem. You are running these commands on your existing working copy and resetting the depth of your chosen directories.