Disk space recovery

We have a somewhat large tree, consisting of source, text data and binary
data. We've been managing this with CVS.

Some of the binary data is large enough that it simply takes too much space
to keep versioning indefinitely. We don't actually need versioning for this
data; it's just convenient to store, download and synchronize the data along
with everything else.

(These are mostly MPEG/Ogg files, which don't tend to diff well.)

When commits to the larger binary files start taking too much space, I simply
go around with "cvs admin -o" on the larger files, wiping out old revisions
to clear up space. Although this is annoying (as it's not self-maintaining),
it works fine: space is recovered, working copies are unaffected, and other
files (where we do want versioning) are unaffected.

I'd like to have the repository migrated to svn, but I can't find any way to
prevent these binary files from killing our disk space.

I've tried playing with svnadmin dump/load, by dumping the head revision
and loading it. This hit several problems: I have to make an interim copy
of the repository; we don't have the space to store two whole copies at once.
It confuses working copies, since the revision starts over at 1. It loses all
versioning, not just specific files.

I'm guessing most of this, except for the copy problem, could be worked around
by filtering svn dumps: replace the original revision of the file with the
latest, and remove all future changes. I can't think of a safe way around the
copy problem with dump/load, and manually filtering dumps isn't all too safe
either (since I have no experience with them).

Is there a sane way to do what I need, or am I still stuck with CVS for now?

-- 
Glenn Maynard
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org