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

On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 5:30 AM, Ryan Schmidt
<subversion-2014_at_ryandesign.com> wrote:
> On Jun 18, 2014, at 8:19 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

But it doesn't. It's an altered history.

>> 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.

If it works well, it should. If it doesn't work well, you've got a
polluted history to repair and potential for serious surprises. What
attempts I've done for this sort of stunt has been fragile, although
newer dump and load tools seem to hve gotten good at revising EOL in
logs as needed. "It works great, until it doesn't" has been my
experience with hstory editing, and it's broken repositories pretty
seriously when it went bad.

This particular revision tool may work well. Not having attempted such
things in years, it may be a stable and trustworthy tool. But editing
such logs is like erasing and revising numbers in old fiscal records:
once you start doing it, you're no longer quite sure what you *used*
to have that used to work, and life can be dangerous.
Received on 2014-06-21 14:27:39 CEST