Re: Moving a repository with svn:externals using absolute paths (URLs)

On Jun 18, 2014, at 8:19 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Brisset, Nicolas <nicolas.brisset_at_airbus.com> wrote:
>
>> We’ve been using svn successfully for years on a server, and now have to migrate to a new one. We are hit by the known issue of svn:externals containing absolute paths to the repo to be moved, since we started with versions <1.5 without support for relative URLs.
>>
>> We’ve been researching how to properly do this, knowing that we handle certified SW on that server, so losing data or corrupting the repo is not allowed, and we want to be able to go back in time and checkout an old state at any time.
>>
>>
>>
>> We’ve experimented the svndumptool (http://svn.borg.ch/svndumptool/) referenced for instance in this post:
>>
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/204616/how-to-migrate-all-urls-in-svnexternals-properties-across-a-repository
>>
>> It seems to be the only tool doing what we want, and it apparently works, but before doing the change on the production repo we’d like to know what experiences there are with this tool, and if it’s safe to use – or if there is a better alternative.
>
> The simple answer I'd recommend is "don't".

I recommend "do". I had success with this method with my own repositories. Now, I don't know what Nicolas' business requirements are with regard to the immutability of old data; my repository was for a personal project which was being migrated to Google Code and being split out of a larger monolithic repository. I continue to find it very valuable that the entire history of the project works correctly within a single repository.

> The amount of time you are going to spend trying to cross migrate old build environments is expensive, fragile, and requires polluting your history to generate a new, and misleading one, pointing to the correct SVN server.

No, the editing should change the absolute external URLs to relative ones, thus no longer pointing at any specific server, rather just using the current server, whatever address it may be known as.
Received on 2014-06-20 11:31:29 CEST