Migration from MS VSS to Subversion

Hi list,

i have been assigned the task of researching the feasibility of migrating
our nontrivial MS VSS repository to Subversion.

We have been using VSS for almost seven years now and the repository appears
stable and consistent but has grown beyond 7 GB now mostly due to our habit
of creating branches with physical repository copies which are of course
*not* cheap and therefore occupy lots of physical space - one major reason
to think about migrating to svn.

Our VSS repository looks like this:

$-comp1
`-comp2
`-comp3
  `-100-Docs
  `-200-Code
  `-V2.0
    `-100-Code
    `-200-Code
  `-V2.1
    `-100-Code
    `-200-Code

So each component has "Vwhatever" subfolders that contain the expensively
copied branches that were created a considerable amount of time ago.

I would like to transform this structure to a better one in subversion, i.e.
the suggested layout with the usual subfolders "trunk", "branches" and
"tags", but each living below the component's main folder, similar to this
here:

$-comp1
`-comp2
`-comp3
  `-trunk
    `-100-Docs
    `-200-Code
  `-branches
    `-V2.0
      `-100-Docs
      `-200-Code

The currently available migration tools create a dump file that i can import
to subversion, potentially piped and filtered via svndumpfilter.

Is there any chance to achieve the structure sketched above (with the
"trunk" and "branches" subfolders below each component's own folder and with
branches created as correct svn cheap copies) and still have the same
history information that we have in VSS?

Or do we have to create the subversion repository in a folder structure that
is initially identical to what we had in VSS and then move stuff around?

Thanks,

Robert
Received on Wed Sep 13 17:55:29 2006