There’s many powerful GUIs out there which you can use to interact with SVN, and make the checking out and checking in very easy. If you primarily use a desktop GUI (like me), then chances are you use a SVN client GUI to interact with SVN on a day-to-day basis.

But what happens when you need to move code between repositories?

I first realised I needed to reorganise my repositories when my single “clients” repository was growing unwieldy. It was one large repository, with all my client work organised into folders by the project name. This method keeps things very tidy, but increments the version numbers with every commit on every project and means you have a very long root log.

A better way, I realised, is to keep the unrelated projects organised in their own repositories - but how to move the code out of my client repository into a new one?

To do this, you’ll need shell access to your SVN server (surely you do - otherwise, how do you create your repositories?)

SVN provides the svnadmin dump command to export data from your repository. In my case, to dump the contents of my entire clients repository, I did the following:

svnadmin dump clients > clients-dumpfile

which creates a text file called clients-dumpfile containing all the revision data for my clients repository. Note that this can create a very large file, as it’s not stored in the ultra-efficient space-saving SVN database any longer.

Say I want to move all my code from a folder called client-1, and put it in its own repository. First thing I need to do, is to create the destination repository:

svnadmin create client-1-repository

Now - the dumpfile contains all the code for all the projects, so how do I filter out the other projects? (this is all one line)

cat clients-dumpfile | svndumpfilter include client-1 --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs > client-1-filtered-dumpfile

What does this do? It takes the previously created clients-dumpfile and sends it through the svndumpfilter program. I’ve told it to include the client-1 folder (and throw away everything else). I’ve told it to drop the empty revisions left behind by the thrown away data, and renumber the rest of the revisions so my new repository is nicely sequentially numbered. The results from svndumpfilter are output into a new file called client-1-filtered-dumpfile.

Finally, you simply load the data into the new repository:

svnadmin load client-1-repository < client-1-filtered-dumpfile

Hopefully, you now have a populated repository with your clients’ code.

First impressions are very good - very quick startup time, easy 1-click installs and a bright and cheery colour scheme.

Unfortunately, I can’t switch for real as the Novell Client doesn’t work yet, and I need to client to access my shared drives at work. (Although I could use WebDAV, it doesn’t work so well). Attempting to install the Beta 2.0 version yields a single dependency error (wrong version of binutils). Satisfying the dependency results in the Novell Client loading - but not connecting at all. Seemingly, the public Beta 2.0 of the client is no longer available for download.

There was quite a wait on Suse 10.2 for a working Novell Client - which was released in beta form a couple of months ago (and it works very nicely too). I’ll eagerly await and hope that Novell release a new client soon, then I will more than happily switch to the new version.

UPDATE 29th Nov 2007

I”ve just spotted that Novell have posted a way to run the 10.2 client on 10.3, over at coolsolutions.

It has a simple step-by-step guide that just involves entering a few commands into the shell.

Now, Bootcamp is supposed to make this easy - you just launch the Bootcamp assistant, and click “Restore the startup disk to a single volume”. A few moments later, all seemed well, and I was prompted to reboot.

After the reboot, the Windows XP drive is still visible, and it seems nothing has happened. After trying this multiple times and getting quickly fed up, I ruled out a few other ways to delete Windows:

• I couldn’t run the Windows XP installer disk - rebooting the iMac with the disk in the drive caused a “Press any key to boot from CD…” prompt. Unfortunately, the iMac keyboard doesn’t work at that point.
• Attempting to run the XP installer from within Vista - the “Install Windows XP” option is greyed out and not selectable
• OS X’s disk utility wouldn’t let me unmount or erase the Windows parition
• I was too scared to use fdisk from the command line, just in case I nuked my OS X partition (and didn’t want to reformat the whole lot for the same reason)

So, how did I fix it in the end?

If you can’t delete Windows from your Mac’s bootcamp installation:

• Drag the Windows parition to the Trash to unmount it
• Run the Bootcamp assistant and choose “Restore the startup disk to a single volume”

Guess that’s the risk you take when you use Beta software eh?