bzr svn-import with a deep branch layout

[Algis Kabaila]

On Wednesday 28 October 2009 12:46:24 Russ Brown wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 October 2009 04:51:53 pm Algis Kabaila wrote:
> > On Wednesday 28 October 2009 02:28:05 Russ Brown wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 27 October 2009 10:05:21 am John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> > > > Russ Brown wrote:
> > > > > Are my suspicions correct, and if so is there any way to get
> > > > > svn-import to detect branches by noticing copies of trunk, rather
> > > > > than simply looking for subdirectories of branches?
>
> Thanks for the suggestions. In our case, our development bzr migration was
> done ages ago: we just decided to take the opportunity to clean the
> codebase up and start with a completely fresh set of repositories, leaving
> the old svn repository in a dormant a read-only state.
>

It was not a suggestion; just sharing an experience of transferring a *small* 
repository from svn to bzr.  Your repository is *big* - a different cattle of 
fish. 

> However, digging through history on it is a royal pain. More often than
> not, you encounter an svk merge with a monstrous commit message, where
> digging into the merged revisions is pretty much impossible.
>
> That's why I'm trying to import it into bzr: since svn-import follows svk
> merges, it will be far easier to dig through history using qbzr.
>
> The good news is that I think I have found a way to workaround this
> problem. First, you need a list of all branches ever created in the history
> of the repository [1], and then set the branches setting in the appropriate
> place in subversion.conf (I also added trunk/ to this list to following the
> docs on the setting). With this in place, the import seems to be doing a
> *lot* better, and is actually properly picking up branches and is also
> handling some of the merges properly too.
>
> I'm not even halfway through the revisions yet, but it's looking good. I'll
> update if/when it's done to report on things like repository size (the svn
> repo is 13G: it will be interesting to see what size this 2a repository
> ends up being).
>
> However, I would like to know if there is any reason why svn-import cannot
> do this itself: detecting a branch creation can be as simple as spotting a
> copy of trunk to anywhere under a specific folder. It would be nice if it
> could do it on the fly.
>
> [1] Getting a list of all branches ever created from trunk should be
> possible using something like this:
>
> svn log -v --xml file:///path/to/repos/branches | xmlstarlet sel -T -t -m
> "/log/logentry/paths/path[@copyfrom-path='/trunk' and @action='A']" -v . -n
> | sort | uniq > all_branches_ever
>
> In my case however this didn't work, as our monstrous svk merge commit
> comments exceeded a libxml limit that I was unable to disable. The xml log
> output from the svn part of the command above was 1.5G. I went through
> attempts in four other languages before finally finding that C# (via mono)
> was able to do it. I can post the (simple) code if anyone would find it
> useful.

Russ, I am trying to avoid any avoidable work.  For me all the programming 
stuff is a hobby and a replacement for my (weak) chess.  So do not post the 
code on my account.  Why not put it in your project's wiki?

Thanks for your nice reply!
OldAl.