[Svnmerge] Test suite functional?

[Michael Haggerty]

On 07/13/2011 01:58 PM, Blair Zajac wrote:
> On Jul 13, 2011, at 1:46 AM, Alan Barrett wrote:
>> On Wed, 13 Jul 2011, Michael Haggerty wrote:
>>> I am trying to use svnmerge.py as a library to help with a conversion of a Subversion project to git.  (git-svn understands svn:mergeinfo, but it does not understand svnmerge.py metadata, so it needs some help.)
>>
>> Perhaps it would be useful to build a filter that could convert from svnmerge.py's metadata to svn:mergeinfo during a dump|filter|load cycle.
> 
> There are two tools that convert from svnmerge.py to svn:mergeinfo, look in here for svnmerge-migrate*
> 
> https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/contrib/client-side/svnmerge

Probably you mean that I look at these tools for inspiration, and that
is a good suggestion.  But to avoid that somebody thinks that these
tools solve the problem, let me explain why it is not the case.

The svnmerge-migrate* scripts only migrate the metadata at HEAD,
creating a new commit for each branch that contains the svn:mergeinfo
equivalent of the svnmerge metadata that was present in HEAD.  The
result is that--to a tool that understands svn:mergeinfo but not
svnmerge.py metadata--it looks like that new commit includes all of the
merges that were ever done using svnmerge.py.

A history-aware data migration requires historical merges to be
represented at the time they were made in the history.  That is why we
definitely need a tool that rewrites the past; either in the form of a
dump-filter-rewrite of the Subversion repository, or in the form of a
tool that understands the history while migrating to another VCS.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger at alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/