Re: Maintaining a SVN 1.7 mirror without network access

On Sat, Jun 3, 2023 at 2:41 PM Andreas Stieger <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 2023-06-03 00:25, Colcord, Scott via users wrote:
> >
> > [...] Subversion 1.7 [...] periodically mirror it to a location that
> > does not have direct net access
> > [...]
> >
> > the mirror needs to be able to receive one divergent commit after the
> > load (this commit alters svn:externals locations to be appropriate for
> > the mirror’s network).
> > [...]
> >
> > Is there a way to replace the mirror repo with the contents of the
> > dump, without needing to manually delete it first – and ideally
> > without needing local rights (perhaps using svnrdump)?  Essentially, I
> > want the revisions from the dump file to replace the same-number
> > revisions in the repo, rather than appending.
> >
> > Is this possible?
> >
>
> No you cannot do it in the way you described, and your approach is
> incorrect. Not for svn, but IT.
>
> For subversion: If you alter the history of the repository in any way,
> all working copies will be invalidated. So even if you repeat the steps
> described, you will need to get new working copies.
>
> Please separate immutable history from the location-specific
> configuration. Either have the network configuration represented in a
> location-specific source, such as local DNS or other
> network-discoverable data. Or simply do not version location-specific
> data that creates a need to change it. Or make the code discover it's
> own location and pick one of the versioned configurations. This isn't
> even working around a limitation of svn, but good system design.
>
> If you proceed like that, you can use the incremental dump feature which
> should make administration faster and more straightforward.



I'd like to add that since Subversion 1.5 you can use relative locations
for svn:externals properties as documented at [1], in case that's helpful.

[1]
https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.externals.html

Cheers
Nathan