svn complete replacement for externals

[andry81]

I am looking for git/svn complete replacement.

Is not clear how the tool would checkout a repo for SVN with following parameters.

To replace svn-external by a record in the vcstool repo configuration file, I have to somehow translate 2 revisions into vcstool format. The PEG revision AND the OPERATIVE revision, which can be used, for example, to fixate an external to a particular revision in a tag (on a date of the commit the tag is created from/for).

Documentation: https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.6/svn.advanced.pegrevs.html

The SVN revisions format for an external:

-r "OPERATIVE_REV" "URL@PEG_REV" "PATH"

I can convert 2 revisions into 1 manually, using the documented algorithm in the SVN book. But nevertheless the SVN can use a date as a revision:

-r "{2021-03-01 05:37:58 +0300}" "...@{2021-03-01 05:37:58 +0300}" ...

Why this has a sense? Because in SVN you can fixate an external repository revision as a date of a parent repository revision. How that translate into the vcstool?

[andry81]

Seems this PR has a change with sparse checkout implementation which is a most closest to svn:externals replacement:

#218
https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool/pull/219/files

Everything else after translation into the git can be just dropped.