Copying from one repository to another, flattening the early part of the source repo's history in the target repo?

I'm working on some Subversion-related software for propagating trunk
checkins to any of dozens of target branches, based on trunk's checkin
comments (that is, where the checkins need to subsequently go automatically is
determined by the checkin comments in trunk, and those comments are
prepared pretty consistently by a custom GUI; the GUI piece is already
written and in production).

I of course want it to work well when we deploy it - and the trunk
we'll ultimately be running it against is rather huge.

So to make it work well from the start, I need to test it well. To
test it, I really want to copy from one SVN server's trunk to another
SVN server's repository - flattening a significant part of the early
history from the source trunk, and then having as-identical-as-practical
checkin comments for the later history.

Is there already a way of setting up such a test branch? I've googled
about it quite a bit and come up with things that are close (svnsync:
way too much test data, svn merge: too few checkin comments unless I
do them individually somehow), but not quite what I need. It's
seeming like writing the program to prepare the test environment is
nearly as complex as what I'm intending to test.

Please note that although I've been an SVN admin in the past, I do not
have administrative access to these SVN servers.

TIA!

(PS: I've written a bunch of unit tests for this, but that's just not
enough - it needs to be tested as a complete system too with
minimal deviation from how it's to be used In Real Life)
Received on 2010-04-29 20:07:11 CEST