I wanted to check out OpenMRS trunk and a couple branches from the subversion repository within the same local copy so that I could apply a set of changes to trunk and backport it to a couple prior versions in a single commit. Typically, when you check out a directory, you get everything underneath. But OpenMRS trunk and the branches I wanted are only a few of the bazillion folders and files underneath http://svn.openmrs.org/openmrs/. Checking out all of those folders would take a long time, place an unnecessary tax on the OpenMRS repository, and end up transferring a bazillion files that I didn’t need. While it’s not obvious, there is a way to do this with Subversion. The answer is in Subversions sparse directories feature. Thank you, stackoverflow! Here’s how I checked out only a subset of folders (trunk and a couple branches) from subversion:
$ svn co --depth empty http://svn.openmrs.org/openmrs
$ svn update --set-depth infinity openmrs/trunk
$ svn update --set-depth empty openmrs/branches
$ svn update --set-depth infinity openmrs/branches/1.8.x
$ svn update --set-depth infinity openmrs/branches/1.9.x