using dump/load for vendor branch

We have been working on getting a consistent methodology for regular
imports from a vendor branch, using the mechanisms described in the SVN
book, and it looks like a workable system. An alternative occurred to
me though, and I thought it might be interesting to see if anyone had
tried or considered it - doing the import using svnadmin dump/load.

We will be importing projects maintained in one repository (the sipX
open source projects at SIPfoundry.org), to an internal repository from
which we will build our commercial distributions. The local changes
will not be extensive (mostly changing names and integrating external
components we can't make open source). Our repository layouts are quite
conventional - they look something like:

at SIPfoundry:

sipX/
  main/
  branch/
  tags/

inside Pingtel:

pingtel/
  main/
  branch/
  tags/
  sipX/

where the sipX/ subtree is the 'vendor' branch imported from the open
source repository. The basic idea is that rather than do an export from
a tag in the sipX repository and use svn_load_dirs.pl to import it to
the Pingtel repository under pingtel/sipx, we would do an incremental
'svnadmin dump' of the sipX repository, and then use 'svnadmin load
--parent-dir /pingtel/sipX' to load it into our internal repository
(possibly after pruning with svndumpfilter?).

This would seem to have the advantage that renames and moves in the
source repository would be automatically reflected correctly, and all
the intermediate states would be visible in the internal repository.

Looking through the list, it appears that this is similar to what some
people have done (or tried to do?) as a repository mirroring mechanism.

Comments?

-- 
Scott Lawrence
Consulting Engineer
Pingtel Corp.   
sip:slawrence@pingtel.com
+1.781.938.5306 x162
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