[Svnmerge] Merging for foriegn repositories

[Blair Zajac]

Archie Cobbs wrote:
> Dale R. Worley wrote:
> 
>>> I think fixing "svn merge" from remote repos would be phenomenally
>>> useful (look at all the folks who use CVSup (e.g. FreeBSD community)
>>> to mirror a CVS repo). It would greatly expand the applications for
>>> svnmerge, making it into a repository mirroring tool too.
>>>
>>> The hard issue is what to do with an add-with-history.
>>
>>
>> Currently, at Pingtel we fake it with a script that erases the history,
>> so "svn ci" will succeed.
> 
> 
> That's a viable approach, however..
> 
> Ideally, somehow svn would look into the target repo for a file
> with the same path as the original (copied) file in the source repo,
> and (only if they have the same contents?) do a copy-with-history
> in the target repo.

Well, 'svn log -v' will tell you the exact path and revision used to make the 
copy of the file.  You could parse this and use an 'svn cat' to get the exact 
same file in the local working copy if you don't have it yet in your working copy.

> Otherwise, imagine tracking a remote repo with lots of branches
> and tags.. your repo will contain whole independent copies of the
> tree for each branch and tag instead of intra-repo "magic" constant
> size copies like the source repo does.

I imaging you'd track one or two directories on the remote repository, so this 
wouldn't be a large issue.  But I wouldn't want svnmerge just to copy any old 
file in my repository just to save space, as the copy history would come along 
with it, and I wouldn't want an 'svn log' to show copy history different than 
the one on the remote repository.

Regards,
Blair