Programmer Musings

Conversion to Subversion: Tags Revisited

In Conversion to Subversion: Tags, I explained how I cleaned up the tags portion of the CVS dump file in order to generate a subversion repository in the format I wanted. Lars Mentrup emailed to say that I had not been clear enough on a few points. After re-reading what I wrote, I have to agree.

In the original article, I referred to working on the initial copy from trunk. This was obviously missing a subtle point. All of my changes started with the dumpfile that had been filtered to contain the project and tag entries. Given this filtered file, I was talking about the initial copy of the tags. This is the equivalent of

  cp 'trunk' 'tags/FIRST_RELEASE'

Now, I really did not want the entire tree copied to the tags directory, and I wanted the tags directory structured differently. So, I changed the equivalent of the above command to the equivalent of

  cp 'project1/trunk' 'project1/tags/FIRST_RELEASE'

Now the dumpfile has a large number of extraneous delete commands that are the equivalent of

   rm tags/FIRST_RELEASE/project2
   rm tags/FIRST_RELEASE/project3
   rm tags/FIRST_RELEASE/project4
   ...

Since I changed the initial copy, these are no longer needed. So, I just delete them from the dumpfile.

The result of all of these changes is a single dumpfile with the 'project1' project information and the 'FIRST_RELEASE' tag information. I can use svnadmin load to load the project and its tags into the repository.

Hopefully, this will clarify what I meant. Thanks again to Lars for taking the time to let me know where I was unclear.