From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 06:43:28 GMT
Subject: Re: Some tips for doing a CVS importer
Message-ID: <20061121064328.GB3332@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90611201629o39f11f42ye07b86159360b66e@mail.gmail.com>

Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> wrote:
> Eventually the Moz crowd will outgrow SVN - perhaps we should be
> parsing the SVN dump format instead ;-)

Its a mess.  :)

Jon and I considered using the SVN dump format to feed git-fastimport
but chose against it.  Its a pretty horrible format.  Especially with
how it handles branches and tags, and file data.

Fortunately SVN has a C library which parses the file for you.
Which means that probably the best way to read the SVN dump format is
to write a program which links against the SVN library and translates
it into the datastructures used internally by git-fastimport to
generate an initial pack file, then repack that after the import
to get good compression.

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