Re: Reading an old SVN database

On May 8, 2010, at 11:10, Felix E. Klee wrote:
> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 6:54 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> Since you only have the old database, your best bet is to get
>> a machine with the same processor architecture as the old server,
>> and a version of Subversion at least as new, and access the repository.
>> If the repository is using BerkeleyDB (BDB) you should also use the
>> same version of BerkeleyDB that the old server was using, otherwise
>> you may need to do some upgrades on the repository before you can
>> read it.
>
> Thanks, that worked beautifully! I built Subversion 1.6.11 with BDB
> 4.3.29, and then I could access the repositary using a file-URL.
> Though it took me some time to find out which version of BDB I need.
> Fortunately, the documentation of the server is accessible using the
> Wayback Machine, and I found that it was most likely running FreeBSD
> 4.11.

For others wondering "how do I figure out what version of BDB I was using back then?" there are instructions here for figuring it out:

http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#divining-bdb-version

Now that you have access to the old repository, you may want to take this opportunity to convert the repository into a dumpfile (using svnadmin dump) and back that up, so that in the future you can quite easily load that dumpfile into any newer version of Subversion on any machine.
Received on 2010-05-08 23:20:10 CEST