Several months ago, I wrote a post about how to regenerate a SVN repository.

In this post I will show how to purge undesired files from it (for example compiler intermediate files, …) on a Windows system. This may be needed to keep the repository size under control.

One thing to care about is that once committed, a file is stored permanently in a repository.  If it will be marked for deletion, it will be effective in future revisions only.

• The first step is to dump the repository.
• The second step is to filter out undesired content by using svndumpfilter command (one or more times).
• The third step is to import the filtered dump to the new repository.

The 1^st and the 3^rd steps are the same as shown in my previous post.

In step 2, we will have to use svndumpfilter, a utility included in the standard SVN package.

Up to now (v1.10), it can do only one operation at a time.

Depending on how these files are distributed into your repository folders, you can plot a strategy to filter them out.

In my case, they may be stored throughout the folder tree, so I choose to filter them out by extension.

You can do this by a specific folder but it can be done only by one folder per time.

Filtering out the undesired files

The first thing is to create a text file (blacklist.txt ?) containing one pattern for line, like the following one:

*.7z
*.bpl
*.db
*.dll
*.exp
*.idb
*.ilk
*.lng
*.local
*.log
*.nativecodeanalysis.xml
*.ncb
*.obj
*.opt
*.pch
*.pdb
*.pdi
*.prm
*.rar
*.res
*.sbr
*.sdf
*.tds
*.tlh
*.tli
*.xml.bck
*.zip
*.~*

then we can write down a small script to execute the task:

set list="<fullpath>\blacklist.txt"
set in_dmp="<incoming dump full filename>"
set out_dmp="<outcoming dump full filename>"
svndumpfilter exclude --drop-empty-revs --pattern --targets %list% < %in_dmp% > %out_dmp%

In the outcoming dump file, all matching files will be excluded and all ‘empty’ revisions will be purged.

We can add ‘–renumber-revs‘ to delete revision holes.