Question

We have SVN repository under Subversion 1.5 server.
I need to move this repository to another Subversion 1.7 server.

As far as I understand there are 3 ways:

• Just move repository to new server.

• Create dump of a SVN 1.5 repository and import the dump to new 1.7 server with the so-called dump-load cycle.

  svnadmin dump

  svnadmin load

• Move repository to new server and then upgrade it to the latest supported schema version:

  svnadmin upgrade

Is it wrong just to move folder of my repository to the new 1.7 server from 1.5 server?
Could there be any problems? If yes – what problems?

Answer 1

Just moving the repository will work, but it won’t give you the optimal result. Subversion 1.6 introduced some repository optimizations that you will miss when you don’t perform the dump/load cycle.

svnadmin upgrade <REPOSITORY>

Will enable future revisions to store the new in 1.6 information, but it will not upgrade the old revisions. But it will at least work better/the same than/as sticking with a 1.5 repository.

(1.7 didn’t introduce a new format, so you are upgrading the format to 1.6 compatible)

New in 1.6 format:

• representation sharing (disk usage improvement)
• store whether a node is a file or directory per log item (svn log improvement)