Last Monday I gave a presentation about Subversion at the Pasadena JUG and I thought now I know Subversion pretty well, As life goes Subversion did not return the favor and I am fiddling around with it even though in my book the given task should be easy but because it is a rare scenario it is not well documented.
What I want to do is to extract a project from an Subversion repository to put it into its own. Now that might sound easy but I wanted to make it clean while still preserving the history. After failing with svn copy I looked into svndumpfilter to see if it would do the trick. In theory it does but not in a real work project. The problem I encountered was that the commits where out of order making it fail when trying to include a branch. Through a short but helpful website I learned that I should not include parts but exclude the unwanted directories preserving the order of the commits and hopefully making the extraction work.
Unfortunately this means that we have to create a file containing a long list of paths to be excluded (long list of projects, tags and branches). After that we should be able to finally load the cleaned up repository through the dump file. The above mentioned web site also points out that one can drop empty revisions and renumber the revisions making it look more like a single project repository.
This weekend I will go over the presentation and publish it on our wiki.
Cheers - Andy