Need advice: svnadmin dump and load between different versions of subversion?

I need to filter out some modules from a fairly large svn repo running under Debian Sarge. The version of subversion is 1.1.4. I am able to perform "svnadmin dump repo", "svnfilter --renumber-revs --drop-empty-revs" successfully. However, I cannot load the dump file into an empty repo. I don't recall the exact error, but I believe it was "transaction not found" or something similar.

As a test, I setup a Debian Lenny environment running subversion 1.5.1. I made a backup copy of the svn repo from the Debian sarge environment into the Lenny one and performed the following operations:

svnadmin --pre-1.4-compatible --fs-type fsfs create svn-old-format
svnadmin dump svn-back > svn-back.dump (Note that svn-back is a copy of the repo running under svn 1.1.4)
cat svn-back.dump | lengthy svndumpfilter command > svn-filtered.dump
cat svn-filtered.dump | svnadmin load svn-old-format

This works perfectly fine in my Lenny chroot under svn 1.5.1. Can I now copy the repo I generated into the old Debian Sarge environment and expect svn 1.1.4 to work with it without any data corruption or other problems? Is this safe to do and are there any tests I can perform to verify data integrity? Perhaps, this is something that should never be done between such differing versions of subversion. I just don't know.

Although I would dearly love to upgrade the Debian Sarge server to Debian Lenny, I will not be allowed to do this. However, I also need to filter out some modules and the only way that seems to work is the approach detailed above. There are huge differences between 1.1 and 1.5, so any advice would be appreciated.

Subversion is installed from the standard Debian packages. BTW this is a production repo of a large size, about 15 GB.

Regards,

Timothy
Received on 2009-04-01 07:17:29 CEST