Moving a folder from one SVN repository to another

repositorysvntortoisesvn

I have a set of repositories with a structure similar to the following:

/Source
  /branches
  /tags
  /trunk
    /FolderP
    /FolderQ
    /FolderR

/Target
  /branches
  /tags
  /trunk
    /External
      /Library1
      /Library2
      /Library3
    /Internal
      /FolderA
      /FolderB
      /FolderC
      /FolderX
      /FolderY
      /FolderZ

I would like to move the folders /Source/trunk/FolderP, /Source/trunk/FolderQ and /Source/trunk/FolderR to /Target/trunk/Internal such that:

/Source/trunk/FolderP becomes /Target/trunk/Internal/FolderP
/Source/trunk/FolderQ becomes /Target/trunk/Internal/FolderQ
/Source/trunk/FolderR becomes /Target/trunk/Internal/FolderR

I should then have the following repository structure:

/Target
  /branches
  /tags
  /trunk
    /External
      /Library1
      /Library2
      /Library3
    /Internal
      /FolderA
      /FolderB
      /FolderC
      /FolderP
      /FolderQ
      /FolderR
      /FolderX
      /FolderY
      /FolderZ

It is imperative that history be maintained during the move.

I have looked at the following 2 questions asked previously which seem to be similar:

I haven't had much luck with the suggested solutions. Specifically, I get an error when I run the svndumpfilter command, which states that:

svndumpfilter: Invalid copy source path `/branches/name-of-a-branch/.../File.cs`

What's going on and how can I get around this problem?

Edit:

One workaround that I am currently trying is to:

Clone the /Source repository into another one called /Temp
Delete the files and folders from /Temp which I do not need and checkin all changes
Dump /Temp repository by calling "svnadmin dump X:\Repositories\Temp > X:\Dumps\Temp.dmp"
Load Temp.dmp into /Target repository by calling "svnadmin load –parent-dir trunk\Internal\Temp X:\Repositories\Target < X:\Dumps\Temp.dmp"
Checkout/update /Target repository
Use TortoiseSVN to move folders out of /Target/trunk/Internal/Temp/trunk/** up into /Target/trunk/Internal (by highlighting the ones I want in Windows Explorer, pressing Control+X and then changing folder to /Target/trunk/Internal and issuing the pasting with TortoiseSVN

NB: The above assumes that svn is maintaining all repositories in X:\Repositories folder and one is using X:\Dumps folder as working folder.

This will clobber revision numbers obviously, but will maintain history. Hopefully, your commit comments do not include references to revision numbers.

Someone else has mentioned an svndumpfilter3 Python script, but I have never used Python and do not wish to learn to use Python, just for this.

Best Answer

Unless you also want to also change the history of FolderP, FolderQ, and FolderR, why don't you simply svn move them to Internal?

Note that svnadmin load takes an option --parent-dir arg, where arg is the parent folder where you want your imported dump to appear under. So
svnadmin load --parent-dir /trunk/Internal dump_of_source_repo target_repo
should import all of the source repo under /trunk/Internal in the target repo.

Related Solutions

Git – How to migrate an SVN repository with history to a new Git repository

Create a users file (i.e. users.txt) for mapping SVN users to Git:

user1 = First Last Name <email@address.com>
user2 = First Last Name <email@address.com>
...

You can use this one-liner to build a template from your existing SVN repository:

svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {gsub(/ /, "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > users.txt

SVN will stop if it finds a missing SVN user, not in the file. But after that, you can update the file and pick up where you left off.

Now pull the SVN data from the repository:

git svn clone --stdlayout --no-metadata --authors-file=users.txt svn://hostname/path dest_dir-tmp

This command will create a new Git repository in dest_dir-tmp and start pulling the SVN repository. Note that the "--stdlayout" flag implies you have the common "trunk/, branches/, tags/" SVN layout. If your layout differs, become familiar with --tags, --branches, --trunk options (in general git svn help).

All common protocols are allowed: svn://, http://, https://. The URL should target the base repository, something like http://svn.mycompany.com/myrepo/repository. The URL string must not include /trunk, /tag or /branches.

Note that after executing this command it very often looks like the operation is "hanging/frozen", and it's quite normal that it can be stuck for a long time after initializing the new repository. Eventually, you will then see log messages which indicate that it's migrating.

Also note that if you omit the --no-metadata flag, Git will append information about the corresponding SVN revision to the commit message (i.e. git-svn-id: svn://svn.mycompany.com/myrepo/<branchname/trunk>@<RevisionNumber> <Repository UUID>)

If a user name is not found, update your users.txt file then:

cd dest_dir-tmp
git svn fetch

You might have to repeat that last command several times, if you have a large project until all of the Subversion commits have been fetched:

git svn fetch

When completed, Git will checkout the SVN trunk into a new branch. Any other branches are set up as remotes. You can view the other SVN branches with:

git branch -r

If you want to keep other remote branches in your repository, you want to create a local branch for each one manually. (Skip trunk/master.) If you don't do this, the branches won't get cloned in the final step.

git checkout -b local_branch remote_branch
# It's OK if local_branch and remote_branch are the same names

Tags are imported as branches. You have to create a local branch, make a tag and delete the branch to have them as tags in Git. To do it with tag "v1":

git checkout -b tag_v1 remotes/tags/v1
git checkout master
git tag v1 tag_v1
git branch -D tag_v1

Clone your GIT-SVN repository into a clean Git repository:

git clone dest_dir-tmp dest_dir
rm -rf dest_dir-tmp
cd dest_dir

The local branches that you created earlier from remote branches will only have been copied as remote branches into the newly cloned repository. (Skip trunk/master.) For each branch you want to keep:

git checkout -b local_branch origin/remote_branch

Finally, remove the remote from your clean Git repository that points to the now-deleted temporary repository:

git remote rm origin

Git – How to clone a Git repository into a specific folder

Option A:

git clone git@github.com:whatever folder-name

Ergo, for right here use:

git clone git@github.com:whatever .

Option B:

Move the .git folder, too. Note that the .git folder is hidden in most graphical file explorers, so be sure to show hidden files.

mv /where/it/is/right/now/* /where/I/want/it/
mv /where/it/is/right/now/.* /where/I/want/it/

The first line grabs all normal files, the second line grabs dot-files. It is also possibe to do it in one line by enabling dotglob (i.e. shopt -s dotglob) but that is probably a bad solution if you are asking the question this answer answers.

Better yet:

Keep your working copy somewhere else, and create a symbolic link. Like this:

ln -s /where/it/is/right/now /the/path/I/want/to/use

For your case this would be something like:

ln -sfn /opt/projectA/prod/public /httpdocs/public

Which easily could be changed to test if you wanted it, i.e.:

ln -sfn /opt/projectA/test/public /httpdocs/public

without moving files around. Added -fn in case someone is copying these lines (-f is force, -n avoid some often unwanted interactions with already and non-existing links).

If you just want it to work, use Option A, if someone else is going to look at what you have done, use Option C.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – How to migrate an SVN repository with history to a new Git repository

Git – How to clone a Git repository into a specific folder

Related Topic