Home | Fun with svndumpfilter

Fun with svndumpfilter

Posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 | Filed under subversion

Earlier this year, I spent days sorting out a Subversion repository handover from the web shop I was working for at the time, to a departing client. The problem was that their repository contained source code for a dozen or so of their brand sites, and one of the brands had been sold to a different company a while back, and as a result the client no longer owned any of that code.

Running the whole thing through svndumpfilter, I kept getting blocked by historical references to resources that were being filtered out. As it turned out, the one site to be excluded had been used as a template for a good number of other sites, to varying degrees. In the end, they ended up getting the 6 months; worth of revision history they wanted for what I could physically give them using svndumpfilter, and flat exports or much shorter history of everything that had roots in the excluded code.

Earlier today, I got sent a link for svndumpfilter3 which is supposed to solve this very problem. I was told it works quite nicely, but haven’t played with it yet myself. I’ll post my experiences when I do.

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