SVN Push Help.

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, 2011-04-29 at 10:14 -0700, Eric Berry wrote:
> I think I'm going to have to assume that at this point that this is
not going
> to work, and I'm not going to be able to save the history with my
split
> projects. I think the only way to save it would be to copy the main
project
> into the new trunks and redoing all the restructuring by deletes and
renames.
> Unfortunately this took me a few days to do the first time with the
split
> command, and I don't have that long to do it again.

Check out Tailor: http://wiki.darcs.net/RelatedSoftware/Tailor .
It's a tool that translates between many VCSes' repository
formats.

Tailor hasn't been updated since 2008, so I don't know whether
it'll handle Bazaar's 2a format; you might have to convert your
Bazaar branches to some older format (see "bzr upgrade", which
can downgrade too).

As a destination format, choose "1.14-rich-root".  If tailor
can't handle even that, you'll have to use a non-rich-root
format ("1.14" or the even older "pack-0.92"), which in turn
means that:
  - you'll have to use the fastexport | filter | fastimport"
    dance (see below) to strip out the rich-root stuff, because
    you can't downgrade directly to a non-rich-root format (I
    don't know how to do that, but someone else here will)

  - you'll have roundtripping problems between Subversion and
    Bazaar.  (I don't know whether it'll be impossible or just
    impractical, but I imagine that what it won't be is easy.
    I'd love to be corrected on this point, though :-/)



If Tailor can't do the job at all, I wonder if you could come up
with some workaround using bzr-fastexport (which is provided by
the bzr-fastimport [sic] plugin).  The export format that it
works with was originally created for git, I believe, but has
since become something of an interchange format for a number of
(D?)VCSes.

I'm thinking you'd fast-export one of the split-off sub-branches
to test with, and then see if any of the following works:

  - Directly import the results into SVN (if SVN has an importer
    for fast-export format, that is; it may well not).

  - Go indirectly via Mercurial, if it has a Subversion
    interoperator that can handle your funky branches.  (Actually,
    you might be able to bypass the fast-export/import step if
    bzr-hg can get you from bzr to hg directly, without
    tripping over whatever split-related weirdness is upsetting
    bzr-svn.)

  - Go indirectly via Git, either using fast-export or (if
    possible) directly using bzr-git.  Same caveats apply.

  - Kludge up a filter for fast-exported files, which smooths out
    the weirdness.  People often go this route when they need to
    do funky things that bzr doesn't directly support (e.g. to
    completely expunge a revision without leaving any trace of
    its contents).  IIRC, the fast-export metadata is all text
    (with interspersed binary sections holding the actual file
    content), so it shouldn't be too painful to manipulate with
    your favourite text-processing language.  The challenge will
    be in figuring out what manipulation is needed :-/



I presume you intend to keep using Bazaar with these branches.
If so, be sure to do thorough round-trip testing, to make sure
that once you've initially got the branch into SVN, bzr-svn can
handle it through several back-and-forth pushes/pulls, merges,
etc.

Best of luck!
  - Eric