differences between nighty~stable

[Toby Johnson]

Jon Hardcastle wrote:
> Hey guys.
>
> Some time has passed.
>
> I'm a little bit older, a little bit wiser maybe.
>
> ..and there is a new nightly build!
>
> But alas I still get the same problem. Can anyone
> help?
>
> The migration completes, but when I 'load' into SVN I
> get an error saying a file can't be found!
>
> Pllease help!
>   

Jon,

Unfortunately at this point the main developers (including myself) are 
no longer very active in this project. Having an open-source VSS to svn 
converter is a pretty nasty beast since there is no possible way we can 
make the script behave in a sane manner in all possible edge cases. Just 
when we think we have figured out all the ways that VSS can screw up 
your data, it surprises us with new and ingenious ways we hadn't thought 
of. :)

Couple that with the fact that this project naturally has a rather steep 
learning curve, along with the fact that this type of project is 
something most people only need to really use once (after it does its 
job, we'll never need it again). Most of us have "scratched our itches" 
and don't really have much time to continue further.

So for your question as to what the status is of the labels and 
nightlies, the answer is just pretty much "what works, works, and what 
doesn't, doesn't." There is no particular roadmap or list of things we 
know are still broken, in the past we have just tried to take care of 
the various issues that arose as we and others found them but again 
since every VSS use case is different (and every database is in 
different states of brokenness) it's just very difficult to do sometimes.

All that being said, some general advice I can give is:
* Go back even further with the nightlies, after the last alpha 
"release" build but before some of the later changes, and see if you 
have better luck with those.
* Inspect your data cache files from your latest run to look for the 
particular file that svnadmin dump is having a problem with and see if 
you can figure out where it's tripping up. (If a particular "physical" 
file in your VSS database is corrupt, you can also try temporarily 
moving or renaming it).
* If labels in general seem to be giving you troubles, bypass that 
entire feature in vss2svn.pl.
* Use svndumpfilter to remove the trouble points. From your particular 
error message, it's possible that the dumpfile is trying to add a file 
before its parent was created, so you may also be able to massage the 
dumpfile or manually create the path after you get the error then split 
the dumpfile from the point where it failed and resume from there. (If 
you follow that route then be sure to correct the svn:date revprop on 
the revision you manually added so that it's in between the two 
revisions on either side).

If you are able to figure out any place where the script is breaking 
down for your particular use case, we'll gladly accept patches to fix them.

Good luck,
toby