[Svnmerge] Better way to convert merge-tracking information into svn native format?

Mon Jul 27 05:02:17 PDT 2009

Hi all,

Our team is planning to upgrade to SVN 1.6, and use the native merge
tracking features of it instead of svnmerge.

Since we have several long-living release branches with svnmerge
merge-tracking information on them, we want to convert this information
into the native svn format. We were hoping that
svnmerge-migrate-history.py would do this for us, but found that its
method is not quite ideal.

It just commits a change that replaced the svnmerge-integrated and
svnmerge-blocked properties with a the equivalent SVN 1.6 property
(svh:mergeinfo). However, it doesn't "rewrite" the history. Old versions
still have the svnmerge.py properties. As a result, SVN thinks that all
merges were done with the single commit of the
svnmerge-migrate-history.py script. In our case, these revisions go into
the hundreds and thousands, so that this becomes rather inconvenient to
handle.

This also means that svn blame -g doesn't work, since the revision where
svn thinks that the merge happened is not the revision where the merge
actually happened.

This is far from ideal. Ideally, the conversion should go through all
old revisions and update any svnmerge.py merge info to the SVN 1.6
format right within these revisions. Is there a script that can do this?
I did not find any.

Such a script would probably operate as a filter on svn dump files, and
convert the properties on each revision in the dump. This looks like a
straightforward task, so that I'm wondering why it's not done this way.
Do I miss something, or do other svnmerge users see no value in
migrating this information? 

I'm considering implementing this ourselves - are there any pitfalls
with this approach?

Ciao
Martina

Dionex Softron GmbH
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