bzr svn-import with a deep branch layout

[Russ Brown]

On Tuesday 27 October 2009 08:46:24 pm Russ Brown wrote:
> The good news is that I think I have found a way to workaround this
>  problem.  First, you need a list of all branches ever created in the
>  history of the repository [1], and then set the branches setting in the
>  appropriate place in subversion.conf (I also added trunk/ to this list to
>  following the docs on the setting). With this in place, the import seems
>  to be doing a lot better, and is actually properly picking up branches and
>  is also handling some of the merges properly too.
> 
> I'm not even halfway through the revisions yet, but it's looking good.
>  I'll  update if/when it's done to report on things like repository size
>  (the svn repo is 13G: it will be interesting to see what size this 2a
>  repository ends up being).
> 

I said I was going to report back when this was finished, so I may as well. :)

This proved impossible on the machine I was trying it on as one revision ended 
up causing bzr to consume the entire 32-bit address space. I moved it to a 
different (64-bit) machine and that was able to complete it in a couple of 
days, not counting the idle time between runs. Over time, I had to reduce the 
size of the chunks I was processing (using --until) as the later revisions 
really started to get larger and caused the machine to swap excessively.

The end result is a packed 2a repository that occupies 5.9G, which is 45% of 
the size of the original 13G svn repository. Nice. :)

The big win for us now is being able to dig through history while taking into 
account the svk merges that bzr now represents natively. We'll only really 
come to appreciate this as time goes by.

Thanks again for your work on bzr-svn Jelmer: fantastic job. :)

-- 

Russ