Subversion: Trimming old commits, keeping revision numbers intact.

Our repository is getting quite large. Some time ago, we reorganised our repository, and none of the history before that reorganisation is really that important.

So, I decided to do a 'dump' of the repository from the earliest required revision to HEAD, and the load that into a fresh repository.

But I got the following warnings:
"Referencing data in revision [X], which is older than the oldest"
and
"Loading this dump into an empty repository will fail."

So I retried this a few times, moving back the 'start' revision until I no longer got this error. Luckily I didnt have to go back much further.

I then did a 'load' cammand of this new dump back into a new repository.

Next thing I noticed was that this new repository, while functionally correct, had different revision numbers. But the old revision numbers are referenced in our revsion tracking system, and in comments throughout out the version history.

How do I load back my dump file, with a starting revision matching the original repository?

I found I could put together a tiny script that inserts a series of trivial commits to the repository, filling in the required version numbers. Then when loading in my dump file, it's commits match the revision number of the original repository.

But since the new repository is not empty when loading the dump file, I need to set the UUID of the new repository to match the old repository, using --force-uuid

Its not the most elegant solution, but seems to work.

The following are the commands I used:

1.
svnadmin dump \SVN\ROOT -r 1282:HEAD > ROOT_1282.dump

2.
svnadmin create \SVN\ROOT2

3.
svn co file:///c:/SVN/ROOT2 ROOT2_WC

4.
echo 0 > ROOT2_WC\zzz

5.
svn add ROOT2_WC\zzz

6.
# NOTE: the following commits from r1 to r1280, since r1281 happens
# in step 8. Then the dump file starting revision (original r1282)
# matches the next revision in this new repository.
for /L %n in (1,1,1280) do (
echo %n > ROOT2_WC\zzz
svn commit ROOT2_WC\zzz -m "empty commit replaces original")

7.
svn delete ROOT2_WC\zzz

8.
svn commit ROOT2_WC -m "removing dummy file used for empty commits"

9.
svnadmin load --force-uuid ROOT2 < ROOT_1282.dump