Welcome to the rsvndump web page!
rsvndump is a command line tool that is able to dump a Subversion repository that resides on a remote server. All data is dumped in the format that can be read an written by svnadmin load/dump, so the data which is produced can easily be imported into a new Subversion repository.
There are scenarios in which it might be better to use svnsync and svnadmin dump to perform the dump than to use
rsvndump. The reason for this is that these tools are officialy distributed with Subversion and might be more feature-complete than rsvndump.
To make it more easier to decide whether to use rsvndump, here's a short comparison of the two solutions for remote repository dumps:
| Feature | rsvndump | svnsync+svnadmin dump |
| Handle all Subversion protocols (svn://, https://, file:// etc.) | yes | yes |
| Dump a whole repository | yes | yes |
| Dump a sub-directory of a repository | yes | only with server running Subversion >= 1.5 |
| Dump a sub-directory of a repository with read access limited to this directory | yes | no |
| Officially distributed by the Subversion developers | no | yes |
Actually, the "Dump a sub-directory of a repository" can be accomplished with the svnsync+svnadmin dump solution on Subversion servers prior to 1.5, too, by using svndumpfilter on the resulting dump. However, this has the downside that the whole repository data has to be transferred while using svnsync. Additionally, it might not be possible to extract the sub-directory using svndumpfilter due to copies from a directory outside the one that is going to be extracted.
rsvndump is written in C and built on top of the Subversion API, so it can offer all functionality needed to access a Subversion repository, including SSL authentication and support for all of Subversion's protocols (svn://, http://, file:// etc.). And it's GPLed.
rsvndump 0.5 is now available. This is again a complete rewrite of the program and introduces new features as
well as bugfixes. The most important features are the ability to perform incremental dumps and the support for dumping text deltas instead
of the usual fulltext. The authentication system has been been improved, too. The bugfixes include a fix for missing file contents if a file
has been copied and changed in the same revision file, which could occur under certain circumstances.
Some of the command line switches of the 0.4-series have become obsolete now. You will get a warning message if you use them, so you should
probably do a manual run if you invoke rsvndump via a different program, e.g. as a cronjob.
A more detailed description of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog. As usual, the source package is
is available as a tarball compressed using either gzip or bzip2. The Debian packages have been updated, too.
I have also uploaded my local repository to github.org, so please feel free to clone it.
rsvndump 0.4.4-1 is now available, fixing build issues with Subversion 1.6.1. Please note that you will see
warnings about deprecated functions when compiling the package, but it should build without errors.
As usual, the source package is available as a tarball compressed using either gzip or bzip2. The Debian packages have been updated, too.
rsvndump 0.4.4 is now available. This release adds a command line option to disable the need for manually
accepting a SSL certificate (--no-check-certificate), which is useful when calling rsvndump from within a script. Additionally,
the program has been made translatable using GNU gettext. A German translation of
all output strings is already included.
As usual, the source package is available as a tarball compressed using either gzip or bzip2. The Debian packages have been updated, too.
rsvndump 0.4.3 is now available. This release includes new features as well as bugfixes: the
command line option --dump-uuid has been added, which dumps the uuid of a repository and is useful
if repositories should be cloned. A bug which could occur when dumping a sub-directory via a file://-url has been fixed. As
a minor change, the svn dump format produces has been changed to version "2" because svndumpfilter refuses to read dump
files with format "3" in current versions (currently, this does not affect the rsvndump's output except for a number at the
start).
A more detailed description of the changes can be found in the ChangeLog. As usual, the source package is
available as a tarball compressed using either gzip or bzip2. The Debian packages have been updated, too.
I updated the ABOUT-section on this web page, and there's now a seperate page which serves as a news archive. Only the 5 latest news items will be displayed on the main page now.
| Jonas Gehring | Last update: June 01, 2009 |