Question

I have a project with one directory that was originally (several hundred commits ago) copied verbatim from another directory, but svn cp wasn’t used so there’s a disconnect in history. Is it possible to connect the two directories at the initial copy point now, or is it too late?

Answer 1

Let me guess what you’re talking about:

• Directory foo is in Subversion
• In revision #100, someone copied foo to bar
• They then added bar to the repository and did a commit and created revision #101.
• Now Subversion is at revision #2302.

What you want to do is somehow go back in history back to revision #100, and redo the copy and add with a true svn copy. That way, you can see the history of bar that it was copied from foo.

There might be a way of doing an svnadmin dump of the repository, and then an svnadmin load.

You need to create a dump of revisions 1 to 100 and another dump of 102 to head. You load in revisions 1 to 100 into the repository. Then you do your svn copy and commit revision 101. Finally, you load in revisions 102 to head into the repository.

That, in theory, should fix the issue. I have never done this particular fix, but I’ve done other selective dump and loads where I changed the history.