Question

It is possible to filter the SVN dump, generated by svndamin dump, so it will not included encoded binary data, just the text deltas and data?

I want to have a dump of an existing large SVN repositories, but only of the code. I have no interest in the stored binaries. However, binary files will make the dump file unnecessarily large. How can I generate the dump and exclude binary content?

Tried and failed, already:

1. It is not practical to process the svn log diffs. It is a large and old repository, and getting diffs only for a short time period takes a lot of time and often gets stuck.
2. The binary files are scattered all over, and not stored under a single known path, so I cannot use svndumpfilter to exclude them – Unless there is some way to use this filter with regular expressions, e.g. *.jar.

Answer 1

svndumpfilter is part of any Subversion installation

svndumpfilter exclude — Filter out nodes with given prefixes from the dump stream.

Beginning in Subversion 1.7, svndumpfilter can optionally treat the PATH_PREFIXs not merely as explicit substrings, but as file patterns instead.

$ svndumpfilter exclude --pattern "*.OLD" < dumpfile > filtered-dumpfile
Excluding prefix patterns:
   '/*.OLD'