eDespot.com

Introduction

Recently I've been using tigris.org's vss2svn 0.3.3 perl script to convert many large Visual Source Safe repositories to Subversion at work. For the most part it works enough for my purposes, however I've come across a scenario that it does not handle.

The problem

VSS apparently has a property one can set on a file to 'not store history' information. This tells VSS to only maintain the latest version of the file. If a file has this property set, vss2svn.pl fails to convert it properly because SS.exe cannot fetch older versions. When it tries to do so, nothing is created, and no error seems to be reported.

The fix

My patch below modifies the 0.3.3 version of vss2svn.pl to check whether SS.exe actually created the file it was expected to. If the file was *not* created, then the script now fetches the file without specifying a version (get latest). This file is then used. If the second fetch fails, the script dies.

Since tigris.org notes that the 0.3 branch is no longer going to be updated, I've released my modification below for anybody who may be in the same boat as I am (need to convert now, can't wait for new scripts to be available).

This solution does have at least one drawback. From what I can tell since each 'version' of this file is now exactly the same SVN will not re-commit changes for it (good thing). However, this also means that later commit comments will be lost for the file. For me that was a workable situation.

Download

This code is released as is. I've tested it myself and it seems to be in good working condition. Please be sure to test it yourself to ensure it does not destroy irrecoverable work!

The patch: vss2svn-0.3.3-p1.patch.bz2
The vss2svn.pl script with my patch applied: vss2svn-0.3.3-p1.pl.bz2

Contact me

Please contact me if you have suggestions or questions about my modification. For general questions about this script please see the main vss2svn site (or the bundled README/INSTALL documents that come with the main distribution).