How do I export a part of an SVN repository with dependencies?

Question

I am trying to migrate a part of an SVN repository using svnadmin dump.

The provided svndumpfilter tool doesn't manage copy/move/rename dependencies from directories not included in the export.

Is there a tool which can manage these dependencies?

Answer 1

I found a Python script by Simon Tatham called svndumpfilter2, which tries to cope with simple dependencies (I found some limitations, though).

You can also check an article about his migration to Subversion and the motivation for the script.

Answer 2

With dependencies you mean those specified by the property svn:external?

If yes, I think you should pass to svndumpfilter also the paths referrend in the property. For example, if your project is in http://host/project and the svn:external property is set to http://host/dependencies you can do something like

svndumpfilter include http://host/project http://host/dependencies < total.dump > project.dump

Answer 3

You cannot get rid of this problem. If you copied a directory/file, you have to include both (source and destination) into svndumpfilter.

However, you can do some tricks:

If you dump a repository not from revision 0, but say e.g. from revision 100, you will get a new repository with revision 1-100 vanished. However, your destination repository has all files/folders in revision 1 as your source repository in revision 100. In this way you can get rid of versioned data without losing the HEAD-Revision.

You can try to dump/load your source repository until your first copy into a "flat" repository, then add the remaining dumps onto it. In this way you can skip the troublesome copy-from revision, as your files are already in the fitting (destination) directory.