I am trying to analyze what happened in a software development effort. I have a copy of the subversion repository but while working my way through it I found something I wasn’t expecting.
The order of the revisions does not coincide with the date order.
Example:
Revision 1 – Day 0
Revision 2 – Day 3
Revision 3 – Day 10
Revision 4 – Day 4
Revision 5 …
I am not very familiar with shared repositories. I was assuming that the order of revisions would be the same by revision number and date. What may be the reasons for these discrepancies? I can also see some consecutive revisions with reversed time differences of months, not just a few days or hours between them.
Was this repository generated from a CVS repository via cvs2svn? If the repository was generated piecemeal from the CVS repository, the dates will be out-of-order. Also if the dates in the CVS repository were out of order then that will be carried along into the Subversion repository.
The same applies actually to anything which manually loads dumps of revisions into the repository, e.g. combining two repositories together.