How do I recover a lost ports directory with svn?

[Bob Willcox]

On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 09:22:10PM -0500, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> Bob Willcox <bob at immure.com> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, Dec 26, 2017 at 02:44:16PM -0500, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> >> Bob Willcox <bob at immure.com> writes:
> >> 
> >> >                                     Unfortunately the documentation for
> >> > svn seems skimpy (at best)
> >> 
> >> Not so. Every command has extensive help, and there's a whole book on
> >> the subversion website explaining the concepts.
> >
> > I get the availability of the book (which I don't have), but I'd hardly claim
> > that the provided command help is extensive. Hardly more than traditional Unix
> > Usage info.
> 
> That's fair. The help messages are enough for me to work out syntax
> without going back to first principles, but, yes, that's pretty much
> what I expect from a man page.
> 
> > Personally, I would much prefer a real man page.
> 
> Funny you should mention that. Some years back, I bashed out a script
> that turned the svn help into a browsable document. I can't find that
> tool in a quick search of my backups, and I don't even remember whether
> it converted things into HTML or info files. [As an emacs user, info is
> roughly equivalent to HTML for such things; I have no idea how info can
> be useful if you aren't using emacs to browse the docs.]
> 
> But the point is that I found the cross-link information fairly easy to
> parse. And once you can do that, you can turn it into anything useful.
> 
> Be full.

Well, I guess I was hoping to figure out why the 'svn up' command wasn't
getting me back the missing swig13 directory. I think I understand that now
(bapt removed it), but at the time it was frustrating.

I've written my share of man pages over the years and do believe that a good
manpage provides more information and insight to the usage of a command than
the svn help does (I find the pkg man pages quite helpful, for example).

Bob

-- 
Bob Willcox    | If everything is coming your way, you're in the
bob at immure.com | wrong lane.
Austin, TX     |