Compress or Zip an SVN Branch

Question

Here I have a question regarding zipping branches in SVN. Actually my current project uses SVN repository. Since this project is live since 3-4 years, there have been multiple features which have been added at later stages.

So, to accomplish that we have created branches in svn. Now in course of time we want to delete some branches and zip other branches(which are required). So is there a way in SVN to zip those branches.

Any suggestions will be helpful.

Answer 1

I strongly suggest reading SVNBook thoroughly. You have to understand how Apache Subversion stores versioned data in the repository and saves the disk space.

The short answer to your question: you can't remove a branch using svn client tools. In fact, it's not required and I doubt it will help you to free the disk space: branching in Subversion does not duplicate any data, i.e. a branch shares history with the path it was branched from. (It is true unless you store very large binary files in the repository).

If you still want to get rid of some branches / tags / whatever and you know what you are doing, then you can use svn repository administration tools such as svnadmin and svndumpfilter to:

1. Create complete repository dump using svnadmin dump,
2. Filter out those unwanted branches / tags / whatever from the dump using svndumpfilter tool,
3. Create new repository using svnadmin create,
4. Load the filtered dump to the new repository using svnadmin load.

I've already answered similar question recently, see the thread: How do I remove an SVN tag completely that contains spaces?.