Moving Directories with History

Question

I have a SVN structure like this:

/Projects
    /Project1
    /Project2
/someFolder
    /Project3
    /Project4

I would like to move all the projects into the /Projects folder, which means I want to move Projects 3 and 4 from /someFolder into the /projects folder.

The caveat: I'd like to keep the full history. I assume that every client would have to check out the stuff from the new location again, which is fine, but I still wonder what the simplest approach is to move directories without completely destroying the history?

Subversion 1.5 if that matters.

Answer 1

Tortoise SVN supports 'Right Click' move. When you drag the source file/directory into the destination using 'mouse right click' a context menu will appear. You can select the appropriate menu option for copy/move/move-rename etc. This option will preserve the history as well.

Note: There is a nice fature called 'Repair Move' in Tortoise SVN - by using this feature you can rename the file/directory when you move it. (Refer to Documentation for more details)

Answer 2

Moving directories in Subversion doesn't destroy history, AFAIK.

Answer 3

IN order to do that, you'll have to use svn's specific move/rename functions (check TortoiseSVN help if you use this for example). If you move the files by yourself and then commit the changes i'm not sure that history will be kept.

Answer 4

svn move SRC DST

$ svn move -m "Move a file" http://svn.red-bean.com/repos/foo.c http://svn.red-bean.com/repos/bar.c

svn move will keep your history.

Answer 5

svn help rename

Moving/renaming in subversion keeps history intact.

Answer 6

As far as I know, only Bazaar allow to keep history on directories, espacially when talking about moving directories. SVN allows you to keep history when moving files, but not directories.