Re: comparing svn and cvs somewhat

On Apr 5, 2009, at 1:36 PM, Chuck Robey wrote:
> I have gotten a local copy of the svn repo going on my home here, by  
> using
> svnsync, which seems (by what I've read and been told) to be the  
> right method.
> I'm wondering about a feature that is there for cvs, in cvsup, but  
> which seems
> to be missing in svnsync for svn.
>
> What I'm after is a much better way to maintain a local repo than  
> what I'm
> seeing now in maintaining my svn repo, with svnsync.  The main  
> feature that I
> think I'm missing is the ability to be able to compare files on a  
> central server
> (something serving all FreeBSDers) to files on everybody's personal  
> repo, and
> to automatically update them if there isn't a perfect comparison.   
> I'm not
> talking about the varying ways that your repo might get damaged, but  
> I think
> that svnsync only knows that you have a particular revision number,  
> not that the
> file is correct.  If your repo gets damage, I think that nothing  
> exists to
> automatically fix it.
>
> So, if this feature IS something that's already available in svn,  
> I'd like to
> here a summary of what tool to use the how to do it, so I can verify  
> myself that
> what I'm thinking about already exists.  That'd free me to begin  
> writing
> software, to see if I could implement such a feature.  I'm not truly  
> certain of
> this, but it seems to me that implementing such a feature, using  
> something like
> Python, would be very easy to do.  Could end up with a svn version  
> of cvs's
> cvsup.  Maybe, call it svnup?  I'm terrible at names, if you think  
> that name
> makes no sense, please, tell  me so.

I looked into this a bit previously.  I wanted something similar to  
cvsup to help me track remote repositories as vendor branches in my  
local repository.  My initial research showed some feature requests  
for "svn export -r REV" which would have done most of this for me.   
Unfortunately the last time I looked it hadn't been implemented.

So based on that I wrote a very-alpha proof of concept script you can  
find here:

   http://www.wanderview.com/svn/public/svnsnap/0.1/

Please use at your own risk because its only been tested very  
lightly.  I've pretty much abandoned this script because I don't think  
a shell script wrapper can handle all the corner cases with the  
current support in the svn tools.  In particular I know this script  
does not handle updates to file and directory permissions.

I started working on a C utility that interfaced directly with the svn  
API's, but I got distracted by real life before getting it in working  
order.

Anyway, I'm interested in a tool like this, but I doubt I will have a  
lot of time in the short term to work on it.

Hope that helps.

- Ben