In releases of Enterprise Architect later than version 4.5, when you save a package to the version control system only stub information is exported for any nested packages. This ensures that information in a nested package is not inadvertently over-written by a top level package.

When checking out a package, Enterprise Architect does not modify or delete nested packages; only the top level package is modified.

As a consequence of this behavior, if you check out or get a version controlled package with nested packages not already in your model, you see stubs in the model for the nested packages only. If you select the Get All Latest option from the version control menu, Enterprise Architect populates these new stubs from the version control system.

Using the above technique you can populate a large and complex model from only the root packages, using Get All Latest to recursively iterate through the attached and nested packages.

This is a powerful and efficient means of managing your project and makes handling very large models, even in a distributed environment, simple.

It is recommended you do not mix versions of Enterprise Architect later than version 4.5 with earlier versions when sharing a version controlled model. If this is necessary it is best to go to the Version Control Settings dialog and deselect the Save nested version controlled packages to stubs only checkbox, defaulting Enterprise Architect to the version 4.5 behavior (for the current model only).