Re: Fixing branches from a (really messed up) subversion repository

I started with svnadmin dump /path/to/repo > svn.dump. Then I had to manually edit svn.dump (I'm sure someone smarter then me could roll this into the Perl script I used in the next step) to create a "trunk" and "branches" directory in the first commit. I found the commits that added "trunk" and "branches" when we re-organized our repo to follow this convention, and deleted them. Then I had to locate where all of the branches were created - looked like

Node-path: branchname
Node-kind: dir
Node-action: add
Node-copyfrom-rev: 23
Node-copyfrom-path:

and change that blank "Node-copyfrom-path: " to "Node-copyfrom-path: trunk". The blank path is what really caused issues because everytime a branch was created, it would contain copies of branches which contained copies of branches, etc... So branch2 had a subfolder branch1, and branch3 contained branch2 and branch 1, where branch 2 contained branch 1...

Then, I removed all of the contents of the commits (not the commits themselves) where we re-organized the repo. i.e.

Node-path: trunk/src
Node-action: add
Node-copyfrom-ref: 23
Node-copyfrom-path: src

and the ones where we deleted nested branches and moved the individual branches into a "branches" directory.

I made these edits and saved them. Then I ran that file through a perl filter, tried to svnadmin load newrepo < filteredDumpFile, and if I got errors, I iterated - changed the pre-filtered file, blow away the svn repo that gave me an error during load, re-create it, and re-load. I iterated this over several days, as I discovered more and more inconsistencies with my edited dump file. I think I have all of the steps above, but I may be missing one or two, and if I am, I apologize. I'd imagine everyone's situation would be a bit different, so adjust accordingly.

Now, I'm quite the Perl hack so I doubt you want to look at the script. It essentially did the following:

Read each line of the dump file.
If the line doesn't start with "Node-path:" or "Node-copyfrom-path:",
then just print it un-altered.
If it does,
  does what follows the ':' start with "trunk", "branches", or "tags"?
 If so, then just print un-altered.
Otherwise,
  for each $branchname(@branchnames) if what follows the ':' begins
with $branchname, replace it with "branches/$branchname", and print.
If none of the branch names match,
  prepend "trunk" to the beginning of the path, and print.

This essentially re-writes all of the paths so that everything not in a branch, or already under "branches", "tags", or "trunk", is put under trunk. It also moves all of the /branchenames to /branches/branchnames.

After this, we did svnadmin hotcopy repo repo-backup rm -rf repo svnadmin create repo svnadmin load repo <filteredDumpFile

Changed the ownership to match the ownership of the original repository, copied over the contents of the repo-backup/hooks directory into the new repo/hooks, and we were all set.

git svn clone --stdlayout... then worked fine. Now I just need to work on a workflow for my co-workers how want to also use git (i.e. create a bare git repo, and keep that in sync with the git-svn repo). Ideally, all of us git users can clone the bare repo and push to it, then every once in a while, I can pull from the bare into the git-svn repo, and do a dcommit, but I've ran into a couple yet-unresolved problems. If you have an references or ideas, I'd appreciate them, but I suppose that's another thread.

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote: