Merging changes to a "copy" of a repository.

[Video Solutions Ltd]

  If it was me, I would have taken a branch copy using branch tag and so the history for the new repository would be retained.

However, a bright spark decided to make a copy of the old repository and create a new repository, hence losing all the history and also the SVN keyword properties for each file. This was only discovered after many changes have been made and further changes have been made since.

While the history is not entirely lost, where we still have the old repository, is there a way of merging the changes, together with its new history onto the old repository (that remains unchanged).

[Daniel Sahlberg]

If I understand your use case correctly you should be able to run svnadmin dump/svnadmin load (or svnrdump dump/svnrdump load if you don't have access to the Subversion server) to extract the history from the new repository and load it on top of the old repository. If/how successful this is might depend on the layout of the repositories (for example if you have the same pathnames in both repositories).

The dump/load process is described in the Subversion book: https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn-book.html#svn.reposadmin.maint.migrate

I highly recommend that you do the merge in a test repository before trying it "live". If you have problems you might use svndumpfilter or reposurgeon (http://www.catb.org/esr/reposurgeon/) to adjust the dumpfile before importing it.

The Subversion project did a somewhat similar operation many years ago when an old development history (in CVS, but it doesn't make too much difference) was merged with a new development history (in an SVN repository) and then loaded on top of a third repository. The process is described in http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/README under the headline REVISIONIST HISTORY.

I hope this gives you a few pointers where to start. If it doesn't work out for you, please post to us...@subversion.apache.org where you can find a lot of experienced Subversion developers.

Kind regards,

Daniel Sahlberg