how to integrate a zip based archive into svn

[Eckard Klotz]

Hello All.

My question is associated with setting up a new SVN archive for an old
project without loosing the old file-versions.

Even I'm programming for nearly 20 years and have a open source project
for nearly 10 years I'm new in SVN. Until now I have archived my project
by zipping my source folder.
Now I wonder if there is a way supported by SVN to transfer every zip
file as one revision into a new fresh SVN archive. It is clear to me
that this will not contain the automatic creation of comments. But
having a archive that contains the historical files and that allows me
to step back to earlier revisions would be helpful.

Best regards,
Eckard Klotz

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

You sound like my old friend Crash, who wrote the CRM114 spam
filtering software. He has much more faith in a USB drive in his own
hands than in a remote source control system,

There's no reason you can't make a local copy of all zip files in a
local working copy, and check that in. I think you'd be in much better
shape if you bothered to unzip the first one, commit that to master,
make a tag, delete the local copy, unzip the second file locally,
commit *that* to master with all the changes, make a tag of *that,
etc., etc. in order to have tags with the relevant changes viewable.
It would make the release changes much more accessible.

There's also no technical reason you can't make a top level "tarballs"
directory, similar to branches and tags, and put your archive tarballs
there. It's not standard, but the flexibility is there.

Also, remember that Subversion has no reasonable "obliterate" option,
If you decide later that you don't really want bulky zip files, it's
very awkward to clear them from a source directory. If that source
directory is well defined and not part of the normal expected workflow
directories such as "trunk", "branches", and "tags", it will be safer
and easier to manage later.

[Ryan Schmidt]

Subversion itself doesn't have such a feature built-in, but you can use a script to do it. That's what I did, years ago, when I first adopted Subversion. The script is called svn_load_dirs.pl

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/contrib/client-side/svn_load_dirs/

The procedure is:

- Create a Subversion repository.

- Create any directory structure in the repository that you need. For example, if this repository will house a single project, create the directories trunk, branches and tags. If the repository will house multiple projects, create a directory for the project name, then inside that create the trunk, branches and tags directories.

- Decompress the archive of the very first version of your project, and import that folder into the trunk folder.

- Tag the trunk with the version number of the version that you imported. Meaning: "svn copy" trunk to tags/1.0 or whatever the version number is.

- For each subsequent version you want to import, decompress the archive, and use svn_load_dirs.pl to import and tag that version.

[Eric Johnson]

Check out the svn_load_dirs script. Look for the instructions in the
manual under managing the "vendor" branches.

There will still be a bunch of work to resolve moves & renames, but
should be much easier.

Eric