Migrating from PVCS to Subversion

I found myself needing to migrate 17 years worth of a corporation's PVCS repositories to Subversion (svn).

There is an excellent and free tool at http://www.polarion.com/products/svn/svn_importer

The included documentation is good, but not great. Searching the web for more answers did not turn up much. So, I'm sharing my notes below for the next lucky soul. Maybe, when the motivation strikes, I'll write up a "How To".

Svn-Importer Executes in Phases

1. pcli listversionedfiles
2. pcli vlog -- Parses the vlog to learn about all revisions, properties, comments, and version labels. The parser is pretty good unless your developers have taken to using a series of dashes in their comments. I suggest running the vlog yourself beforehand, searching for all such comments (see perl below), and modifying them in the PVCS GUI. Look for any lines containing a series of dashes not immediately followed by a "Rev ..." line of text. Simply remove any series of dashes in a comment.
3. pcli get -- Does a get of all revisions of all files into a temporary directory, see note about disk space requirements.
4. Creates the dump files while running checksums against the files pulled in step 3 (see config.properties xxx).
5. Cleans up temporary files and exits (see config.properties "disable_cleanup")

Line Endings

Disk Space

Memory

Log Files

Promotion Groups

Some Helpful Shell Scripts

perl -e 'while(<>){next if $_ !~ m/----/; $x=<>; print "$.\t$x" }' < vlog.txt | grep -v Rev

Assign Version Label to Promotion Group

for pgroup in Development-1 Development-2 Integration UAT Production
do
   plabel=$(echo $pgroup | sed 's/-//g')
   pcli run -y Label -pr''project_name'' -v"svnbranch_$plabel" -r"$pgroup" -z /
done

Copy a tag to a branch in Subversion

svn copy ''svn-path''/tags/svnbranch_Production ''svn-path''/branches/Production