Jeremy Coenen

I have been using subversion full-time at work for about a year and a half now and I can pretty definitively say it is the most robust and easy to use Source control product I have ever used. To be fair I have only used two other Source Control Providers (StarTeam and Visual SourceSafe) and while both can get the job done, too often you find that you either can’t do something or you have to stand on your head to get it done. Subversion is just so seemlesss and easy, sometimes you even forget it’s there, which is the way it should be.

Well anyway the reason I wrote this post is because I recently had the task of moving a subversion repository hosted at my company’s external subversion server and moving it to a seperate subversion server running at one of our client’s sites. Well backing up the existing repo, was done with one command line in a command prompt

svnadmin dump /path/to/repo > reponame.dump

Zipped up the file and FTPd it over to client.

On a side note I don’t know how subversion does it but an entire dump of the repository and all of the revisions that go a long with it is amazingly small (it’s actually not that much bigger than the actual files themselves)

Anyway once I got the file unzipped and where I wanted it I could easily create a new repo on the client’s subversion server and load my dump file.

cd /path/to/new
svnadmin create reponame
svnadmin load reponame < reponame.dump

That’s it!! I have never done this with another SCC provider, but I can’t imagine it would be that simple.

Well now here comes the real kicker. The client already had a repository on their subversion server and well now I had just created a second repository with the data from our subversion repository. I thought you know what it would be cool if I could just merge these two repositories into one….well a little research and guess what…you can!!

Instead of creating a new repository like I did above, I can just load the dump file into an existing repository and it will merge them into one repository with complete revision history for the existing repo and the one you are loading into it.

svnadmin load ExistingRepoName < yourdumpfile.dump

Resources:
http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2005/01/13/move-a-subversion-repository-from-one-machine-to-another http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#multi-merge
http://wadhome.org/svn_vs_vss.html

Additional Visual Source Safe info
Favorite Visual Source Safe quote, supposably from a Microsoft employee

“Visual SourceSafe? It would be safer to print out all your code, run it through a shredder, and set it on fire.”

Microsoft has since replacecd VSS with the new Team Foundation server, which I believe is running behind the scenes at Microsoft’s new community development site CodePlex (replace GotDotnet Workspaces which had its own slew of issues), well hopefully they have improved things, but I know of at least one project on there run by a Microsoft MVP that has had some mysterious missing source code issues.