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REPOCUTTER(1) Development Tools REPOCUTTER(1)

repocutter - surgical and filtering operations on Subversion dump files

repocutter [-q] [-r selection] subcommand [-d] [-i]

This program does surgical and filtering operations on Subversion dump files. While it is is not as flexible as reposurgeon(1), it can perform Subversion-specific transformations that reposurgeon cannot, and can be useful for processing Subversion repositories into a form suitable for conversion.

(As a matter of possible historical interest, the reason for the partial functional overlap between repocutter and reposurgeon is that repocutter was first written earlier and became a testbed for some of the design concepts in reposurgeon. After reposurgeon was written, the author learned that it could not naturally support some useful operations very specific to Subversion, and enhanced repocutter to do those.)

In all commands, the -r (or --range) option limits the selection of revisions over which an operation will be performed. A selection consists of one or more comma-separated ranges. A range may consist of an integer revision number or the special name HEAD for the head revision. Or it may be a colon-separated pair of integers, or an integer followed by a colon followed by HEAD.

Normally, each subcommand produces a progress spinner on standard error; each turn means another revision has been filtered. The -q (or --quiet) option suppresses this.

The -d command enabled debug messages on standard error. These are probably only of interest to repocutter developers.

The -i command sets the inmput source to a specified filename. This is primary useful when running the program under a debugger.

Generally, if you need to use this program at all, you will find that you need to pipe your dump file through multiple instances of it doing one kind of operation each. This is not as expensive as it sounds; with the exception of the reduce subcommand, the working set of this program is bounded by the size of the largest commit metadata item. It does not need to hold the entire repo metadata in memory.

The following subcommands are available:

help

Without arguments, list available commands. With a command-name argument, show detailed help for that subcommand.

select

The 'select' subcommand selects a range and permits only revisions in that range to pass to standard output. A range beginning with 0 includes the dumpfile header.

propset

Set a property to a value. May be restricted by a revision selection. You may specify multiple property settings. See the embedded help for syntax details.

propdel

Delete the named property. May be restricted by a revision selection. You may specify multiple properties to be deleted. See the embedded help for syntax details.

proprename

Rename a property. May be restricted by a revision selection. You may specify multiple properties to be renamed. See the embedded help for syntax details.

log

enerate a log report, same format as the output of svn log on a repository, to standard output.

setlog

Replace the log entries in the input dumpfile with the corresponding entries in a specified file, which should be in the format of an svn log output. Replacements may be restricted to a specified range. See the embedded help for syntax details.

strip

Replace content with unique generated cookies on all node paths matching the specified regular expressions; if no expressions are given, match all paths. Useful when you need to examine a particularly complex node structure.

expunge

Delete all operations with Node-path headers matching specified Python regular expressions. Any revision left with no Node records after this filtering has its Revision record removed as well.

pathrename

Modify Node-path and Node-copyfrom-path headers matching a specified Python regular expression; replace with a given string. The string may contain Python backreferences to parenthesized portions of the pattern. See the embedded help for syntax details.

renumber

Renumber all revisions, patching Node-copyfrom headers as required. Any selection option is ignored. Takes no arguments.

reduce

Strip revisions out of a dump so the only parts left those likely to be relevant to a conversion problem. See the embedded help for syntax details and the relevance filter.

see

Render a very condensed report on the repository node structure, mainly useful for examining strange and pathological repositories, File content is ignored. You get one line per repository operation, reporting the revision, operation type, file path, and the copy source (if any). Directory paths are distinguished by a trailing slash. The 'copy' operation is really an 'add' with a directory source and target; the display name is changed to make them easier to see.

swap

Swap the top two components of every path. This is sometimes useful when converting a multi-project Subversion repository that has normal trunk/branch/tag structure under each top-level directory (of course the alternative is to break it into componebts using mutiple strip operations).

Under the name “snvcutter”, an ancestor of this program traveled in the contrib/ director of the Subversion distribution. It had functional overlap with reposurgeon(1) because it was directly ancestral to that code. It was moved to the reposurgeon(1) distribution in January 2016.

This program was ported from Python to Go in Aygust 2018, at which time the obsolete "squash" command was retired.

reposurgeon(1).

Suppose you have a Subversion repository with the following semi-pathological structure:

Directory1/ (with unrelated content)
Directory2/ (with unrelated content)
TheDirIWantToMigrate/


                branches/


                               crazy-feature/


                                               UnrelatedApp1/


                                               TheAppIWantToMigrate/


                tags/


                               v1.001/


                                               UnrelatedApp1/


                                               UnrelatedApp2/


                                               TheAppIWantToMigrate/


                trunk/


                               UnrelatedApp1/


                               UnrelatedApp2/


                               TheAppIWantToMigrate/

You want to transform the dump file so that TheAppIWantToMigrate can be subject to a regular branchy lift. A way to dissect out the code of interest would be with the following series of filters applied:

repocutter expunge '^Directory1' '^Directory2'
repocutter pathrename '^TheDirIWantToMigrate/' ''
repocutter expunge '^branches/crazy-feature/UnrelatedApp1/
repocutter pathrename 'branches/crazy-feature/TheAppIWantToMigrate/' 'branches/crazy-feature/'
repocutter expunge '^tags/v1.001/UnrelatedApp1/'
repocutter expunge '^tags/v1.001/UnrelatedApp2/'
repocutter pathrename '^tags/v1.001/TheAppIWantToMigrate/' 'tags/v1.001/'
repocutter expunge '^trunk/UnrelatedApp1/'
repocutter expunge '^trunk/UnrelatedApp2/'
repocutter pathrename '^trunk/TheAppIWantToMigrate/' 'trunk/'

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>. This tool is distributed with reposurgeon; see the project page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon.

12/22/2018 repocutter