[Nut-upsdev] Still plugging away at the repo conversion

[Eric S. Raymond]

This is taking longer than I expected, because there is all kinds of
cvs2svn-generated ugliness in your back history that tends to crash 
my tools. Your repo makes a great test case. (Yes, I know, that's like
having someone say "Your dog is fantastically ugly!")

Current state of things is that I have scrapped my precious approach,
which was to put the Subversion tools in a Python harness and replay
the repo history.  The problem with this is that it was hideously 
slow - your 3.3K commits took over 8 hours to process.

I'm now working on a parser for Subversion dumpfiles.  This approach -
use svnsync to grab the history, use svnadmin dump to turn it into
a dumpfile, reposurgeon interprets the dumpfile - is much, *much* 
faster. A full read takes about 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, though my parser works fine on a dozen test repos, it
crashes during postprocessing on yours.  Weird combinations of stream
operations and Unicode in the comments are two issues. I'm working on
it.

A side effect of this project is that I am writing documentation 
for the Subversion dumpfile format that - gasp! - actually documents
it.  Nobody other than the Subversion devs themselves have ever tried
to get this intimate with it before.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best
state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one;
for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries *by a
government*, which we might expect in a country *without government*,
our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means
by which we suffer."		-- Thomas Paine