Question

I made the mistake of creating a Subversion repository without the usual trunk, branches, and tags directories. That is, the root directory of the project maps to the root directory of the repository. Now I want to create a feature branch, but there’s no good place to put it. What I’d like to do is move / to /trunk, preserving its properties and history. Am I out of luck?

Answer 1

The clean way to do this is using svnadmin to dump out the whole repository using

svnadmin dump

Then create a new repository with the trunk directory at the root, and reload the dump with

svnadmin load --parent-dir trunk

If you do an svn move then that will mess things up if you ever update back to a revision before the move, since the files will move back to their previous location, which is probably not what you want.