svndumpsanitizer is a gem

I've been supporting Subversion repositories in my work for more than ten years already. During this time I've grudgingly done my fair share of migrations, moving partial histories from one repository to another.

The standard procedure consists in dumping the source repository, filtering the resulting dump to keep only the part of the history you're interested in, and loading the resulting dump into the target repository. It's possible to do it in a single pipeline like this:

svnadmin dump source | svndumpfilter options | svnadmin load target

If you ever did this to any non-trivial repository you must know how exasperating it can be to come up with the correct options. It's a trial-and-error process because you never know exactly which paths you need to include in the filter, since Subversion histories have a tendency of containing all sorts of weird movements and renamings, which break the filtering. Then, you have to understand which path you have to add to the filter and restart the process from the beginning.

This week I embarked in a Subversion migration adventure. If I only knew how I would regret it... I had to move the histories of some 15 directories from three source repositories into a sub-directory of a single target repository. They are big and old repositories, but the directories seemed innocent enough that I started very confident. To be sure, all but two of the directories were moved easily.

The remaining two kept me busy for most of the week though. Their histories are long and windy. During the course of my trials I became aware of some options in newer versions of the "svnadmin dump" command that promised to make it possible to avoid the intermediary svndumpfilter command. But it failed. Hard. Repeatedly. Annoyingly.

I gave myself today as my last chance to finish the process. I almost gave up but by chance I stumbled upon a link to svndumpsanitizer... and I was saved.

It's a simple, fast, and intelligent tool that seems to solve all the problems that the svndumpfilter program has. And it's superbly documented too. It's page explains very well the usual problems we get with svndumpfilter and how it overcomes them.

Discounting the time to make the initial dump and the final load, the filtering took less than a minute. Awesome!

Kudos to svndumpsanitizer's author, dsuni at GitHub, for such a gem!