How can I fix the SVN import line endings error?

Question

I have to import an huge SVN repository that I have to transfer from one server to another. So I exported it from the old server:

svnadmin dump . > archive.sv         


        

Answer 1

With a little gymnastics you can work around this using svnsync, which has the ability to fix the EOLs. Let's say that your repository is dumped in archive.svn.

First create the repository to load the repo back, ignoring the EOL problems:

svnadmin create repo
svnadmin load repo < archive.svn --bypass-prop-validation

Now create a new repository for copying into:

svnadmin create repo-fixed

svnsync requires some pre-commit hook, even if you don't use it, so just use your editor to create an empty one in repo-fixed/hooks/pre-revprop-change:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0

Initialize the destination repository for svnsync:

svnsync init file:///path/to/repo-fixed file:///path/to/repo

Now copy the entire repository over:

svnsync sync file:///path/to/repo-fixed

Whew! svnsync will even give you good news: NOTE: Normalized svn:* properties to LF line endings (Why the Subversion team didn't update svnadmin to do the same normalization is a mystery to me.)

Once that's done, dump the new repository:

svnadmin dump repo-fixed > archive-fixed.svn

You now have archive-fixed.svn, which should be identical to archive.svn except the EOLs have been fixed as needed.

(Optional) You can now remove the temporary repository you used for svnsync:

rm -rf repo-fixed

Update It turns out if you load this new dump, your Subversion client gets an error: Repository UUID does not match expected UUID. You'll have to use svnadmin setuuid ... to change the UUID ID to what it used to be.

(This post is a culmination of a multitude of snippets and partial solutions I found around the web. Thanks to all the people who knew more than I did; I just put it all together.)

See also:

• Copying subversion repositories with history using svnsync
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/28472420/421049
• https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/notes/svnsync.txt

Answer 2

The first option of the answer of @ventura10 sounded good but didn't work for me. The sed command changed some versioned content outside the properties section resulting in md5 mismatches while loading the dump.

Because my repository has no properties with binary content I changed the sed command to correct all properties and not only svn:log and svn:ignore. I was also sure that no versioned file contained a line starting with Prop-content-length:. Otherwise I would have got an error when loading the dump.

sed -e '/^Prop-content-length: /,/^PROPS-END$/ s/^M/ /' svn.dump > svn.dump.repaired

It's important to replace ^M with [blank], because the size of the property value must not change.

The note of @ventura10 is still valid:

^M is a control character, that means 0D in hex. To get it use ^V^M (control V control M) instead ^M (circumflex M or control M)

It's hard to believe that upgrading an existing repository from svn 1.4 to svn 1.7 makes this step nessecary, but I've found no other way to get rid of the carriage returns that are no longer accepted since svn 1.6.

Answer 3

My problem was that the commentary of the commit was too big.