This week, we just had it. The current provider we pay to host our subversion repositories is just unbearable, and so we decided to move (on) to [Unfuddle][3]. Our reason to move to Unfuddle is that they offer everything we need (and more, e.g. Git), at a pretty good price. I also heard Unfuddle a 100 times when I shopped for a recommendation.
And on top of all the features, they also kick butt at support and for example offered to import our repositories right away. But, has anyone of you tried to dump a subversion repository, ever?
Creating a dump
Being a good user, I rtfm’d first. The manual states to use svnadmin dump. And apparently it’s that easy?
Not really.
First off, the manual tells me to: svnadmin /path/to/repo. That didn’t work at all though. Instead I had to svnadmin dump /path/to/repo/.svn. But that didn’t work regardless.
After rtfm, there’s stfw, and I did that too when I encountered the following issues:
server# svnadmin ./path/to/repo/.svn
svnadmin: Expected repository format '3' or '5'; found format '8'
… then I updated my local subversion client, checked out a new copy of the repository, and got this:
server# svnadmin ./path/to/repo/.svn
svnadmin: Can't open file './path/to/repo/.svn/format', no such file or directory
There really is no format file when I check out the same repository with Subversion 1.6.3.
Apparently a more recent version of Subversion cannot deal older repositories?
Updated, 2009-07-23: Apparently it helps to be awake while doing this. The solution to the problem above is rather simple. svnadmin does not work on a checkout, but only on the real repository. So in case you are hosting with an external provider such as Unfuddle, Hosted Projects, CVSDude, Assembla and so on, you won’t be able to svnadmin dump on a working copy.