challenges using fast-import and svn

I have an svn repo containing several small projects that is an odd "shape" (in terms of directories) because of its history; git-svnimport doesn't like the directory structure, and I wasn't able to coax it to work.

I looked around for other options, and discovered fast-import (thanks Shawn!). I decided that the "easiest" approach would be to parse the svn dump file and feed the commits into fast-import.

So I wrote, in Lua, a parser for the (terrible) svn dump file format that feeds commands into fast-import. The parser took a day and a half to write; the fast-import backend took about an hour. ;-)

However, there are issues. I don't currently track branch copies correctly, so branches start out with no history, rather than the with the history of the branch they are copied from; and handling deletes is tricky.

This last thing is my main "question" to the list, although I'm curious if anyone else has played with svn dump files, and whether my approach makes sense.

Here is the problem: if a file or directory is deleted in svn, the dumpfile shows simply this:

Node-path: trunk/project/file-or-directory
Node-action: delete

In the case of a file, I can simply feed a "D" command to fast-import; but if I'm deleting a whole directory, my code knows nothing about what files exist in that directory. Is fast-import smart about this? Will it barf if given a directory argument rather than a file for "D" commands?

I could cache the directory contents in my code, but isn't that partly what fast-import is good for?

Any thoughts are welcome.

Cheers,

- David