Migrating from Subversion 1.4 to 1.6

Question

Can someone point me in the right direction to migrate the Subversion 1.4 repository to Subversion 1.6 on another server? I would appreciate any help I can get, I am not very lucky to have done this.

Answer 1

First of all, I'm not 100% sure that you can freely move the dump file between Linux and Windows. You may need to convert the ends of the lines.

Then you must first transfer the repository to 1.4 format, and then update it in place. One way to do this on the target machine:

svnadmin create --pre-1.5-compatible /path/to/repo svnadmin load /path/to/repo <dumpfile svnadmin upgrade /path/to/repo 

For more information on svnadmin, see the book.

Answer 2

We did it a little differently: we created a new repository and used svnsync to create a mirror of the repository. This should be read-only until you want to switch. Then add the hooks to the old repository to prevent committing (ideally, a display and error message telling your users to move to the new repository). svnsync one last time and activate a new repository. It was much faster than dumping and more efficient, because we could catch up and synchronize the latest changes with old repositories.

Answer 3

Make sure you treat this dump file as a binary file. It looks like a text file, and you can get away with editing it in several ways ... but it is not just text. Therefore, if a newline conversion occurred during the transfer or something that you could start with a mess.