How do I batch rewrite an SVN log?

Question

I need to do a search/replace over the names of users making changes to my SVN repository; we're making some organizational changes so I need to change 'fantasticMan' as the author of various changes in the log to 'authorA' (just an example).

My idea was to svn dump and then do a search/replace over the dump file. The problem is that after the first checkout, it only gets to revision 1; when I was doing an svnadmin load command I got this message: svnadmin: Dumpstream data appears to be malformed. I suspect that there are some checksums in the log to ensure the integrity of the dumpfile so I can't just do a search and replace over the dumpfile.

How do I make changes on the author names of a repository? (If there's a way to do this without having to dump the repository and then reload the dump, I'd prefer that solution.)

Answer 1

Is there a way to change a SVN users username through the entire repository history?

Using svndumptool works best. A.H.'s way would take me much longer.

Answer 2

You can use svnadmin setrevprop for that. In Linux speak:

svnadmin setrevprop -r1 MyRepoDir svn:author <(echo -n NewAuthor)

So the next question will be: How the get the old author:

svnlook author -r1 MyRepoDir

So you will basically iterate from revision 1 up to "youngest" and map each author on the way. I hope for you, that you don't have as many revisions as some Apache repositories. :-)