A Limitation in Subversion. Any ideas?

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Today, I was speaking with an expert at CollabNet (the Subversion folks) about a problem I have with Subversion. To my amazement, he told me Subversion can't handle my (apparently) simple problem.

When I work on Platypus, I start by checking out my code from the public Subversion repository. I put it in my local project directory, and work there. Along the way, I might write code that breaks existing tests. At some point before I get all tests working, I want to check my code into an SCM, so that I can get back to where I am right now, if something should go wrong. Best practices in SCM forbid committing code to a project directory if it breaks tests. So, the way to do what I need, it would seem, is to use a temporary repositorty to commit to until I'm finished coding. Then, when all tests pass, I can commit the code back to the original public Platypus repository.

But Subversion does not permit checking code from one directory into different repositories. The suggestion from CollabNet was to copy the code to a temporary directory from which I could commit it to a separate Subversion repository. This, of course, is a non-starter--you don't keep two live copies of the code you're working on. That makes for all sorts of errors.

Another suggestion was to create a branch in the public repository and commit the small changes to that branch, and eventually merge the branch when all tests pass. I don't like this either, because it forces me to check non-working code into a public repository--the whole thing I want to avoid.

The only solution I've come up with is to use a different SCM (Perforce) for my local repository. Check temporary code into it. Then when everything is copascetic, check the tested code into the public Subversion directory. This works, but it's hardly elegant.

How do you solve this problem or how do you avoid it to begin with? TIA