Discontinued (for now?)

I really don't have time to work on this project. I was hitting some bigger difficulties with getting a reasonable performance out of SVN without writing my own SVN client.
However, there is now FSVS, which should be able to do most of what I intended to achieve with laysvn, so you might just want to go ahead and try that software. It's likely more mature, it's hosted at the subversion site and apparently still under development.

Layered subversion

This is a small utility called 'laysvn', which uses multiple layers of subversion to generate one working directory.

Setup

Create two directories. One for the real svn checkouts (I called it 'storage', you can place it anywhere, and one directory for your working copy.
Inside the working copy directory, create a dir named .laysvn, in there make a new file called laysvn.xml with contents following this schema:
<config title="LaySVN test">
  <storage path="/path/to/where/your/storage/dir/is" />
  <layer id="base" source="http://subversionserver/repository/layers/base" />
  <layer id="dns" source="http://subversionserver/repository/layers/dns" />
  <layer id="apache" source="http://subversionserver/repository/layers/apache" />
  <layer id="hostname" source="http://subversionserver/repository/layers/hostname" />
</config>
Now you can run laysvn in this directory, it will checkout your layers, and then copy the files from the layers into your working dir!
To check in your changes, you have to chdir to your storage/layer directory and run 'svn ci' there. This is also where you can resolve conflicts.

Command line syntax

Just four commands, no options available currently:

Download

If you want a working version, you currently have to go to the old versions download page
The new version is still incomplete, but you can browse the source in the laysvn subversion repository.
Written by Erich Schubert