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svnsquash has grown new capabilities

From: Eric S. Raymond <esr_at_thyrsus.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 21:37:58 -0400 (EDT)

Recently I submitted a tool I then called "svnsquash" to this list that
could clean up scar tissue from CVS and old versions of Emacs VC.

Unhappily, I have recently had to enhance this tool considerably.
Last Friday, the hosting site for one of my projects crashed in a rather
permanent-seeming way. As I had to try to reconstruct the project
history from a two-week-old Subversion dump and a git mirror of more
recent commits, the next 72 hours involved a lot of frantic repository
surgery.

Rather than hand-hack, I upgraded my tool each time I had to perform a
new surgical maneuver; there was enough cut-and-try involved that I
saved a lot of time by being able to repeat operations reliably. As a
result, the tool now has the following additional capabilities:

* Set a specified revision property to a specified value on a range of
  revisions.

* Remove a specified revision property on a specified range of
  revisions.

* Take a file in the format of an svn log report and use its content to set the
  log property of each revision mentioned in the file.

Note, these are all operations on *dumpfiles*, not repos. The tool
remains a filter transforming a dumpfile on stdin to a dumpfile on
stdout. This has advantages I don't think I need to belabor here.

The tool's new name, after all that surgery, is "svncutter". I am
probably going to add the ability to excise a specified set of
revisions (extending the existing ability to select a range)
within the next few hours.

My problem is this. The script is no longer a casual hack with
just enough substance to belong in a contrib directory - I'm probably
going to write some actual unit tests for it tonight. But it's also not
large enough, or separable enough from Subversion-as-it-is, that I
feel it makes sense to ship it as a standalone project.

Your advice is solicited.

-- 
		Eric S. Raymond
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
	-- R. Buckminster Fuller
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Received on 2009-10-07 03:40:35 CEST

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