Nov 18 2008

Visual SourceSafe to SVN migration.

Category: Programming, tools — Maciek Talaska @ 10:51 pm

After struggling with VSS for quite some time I decided to switch to SVN with all my private projects. I have used SVN before and I think it is great, but never had enough time to migrate all the projects. I thought that such an operation could not be painless. History of all changes was crucial for me – I did not want to devote all those information held by VSS just because of the migration. I started looking for some kind of script I could use… and I was very lucky, because almost immediately I found the solution that did all the work for me. VssMigrate is a command line C++ utility developed by a bunch of folks (y

ou will find all the info on the utility site). At the project page one will find a bunch of releases (bug fixes, additional features…) – personally I think the best idea is follow author’s advice and download one of the latest (the one with ‘tim2′ suffix seems to be the latest one – it automatically removes VSS bindings). VssMigrate seems to be quite mature and as much developer-friendly as could be – the only thing one has to do is to configure this tool by editing .config file. It did take me, however, a couple of minutes to configure it properly, but when I figured out the proper values… the migration was quick as lightning. Below you may find configuration that worked for one of my projects:

<add key="VSSWIN32" value="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe"/>
<!-- # VSSWin32 directory which contains ssapi.dll-->
<add key="VSSDIR" value="d:VSS"/>
<!-- #VSS repository directory (contains srcsafe.ini)-->
<add key="VSSPROJ" value="$/RegionCreator/"/>
<!-- #VSS project to start at (ie $/Product)-->
<add key="VSSUSER" value="<user>"/>
<!-- #User to use for VSS commands, use blank for none-->
<add key="VSSPASSWORD" value=""/>
<!-- #password to use for VSS commands, blank is OK-->
<add key="SVNUSER" value="<computer_name><user_name>"/>
<!-- #User to use for SVN commands, use blank for none-->
<add key="SVNPASSWORD" value=""/>
<!-- #password to use for SVN commands, blank is OK-->
<add key="SVNURL" value="file:///D:/Svn/RegionCreator"/>
<!-- #URL to use for the root of the check in-->
<add key="SVNPROJ" value="trunk"/>
<!-- #SVN project to start at (ie $/Product)-->
<add key="SVNREVPROPSPATH" value="d:Svndbrevprops"/>
<!-- #SVN Repository directory (ends in [RepositoryName]dbrevprops)-->
<add key="WORKDIR" value="c:Tempvss"/>
<!-- #Directory under which files and directories will be created as work progresses-->
<add key="DEBUG" value="1"/>
<!-- #turn on debug output, blank is OK-->
<add key="AUTORETRY" value="1"/>
<!-- #if a command fails to run, it will be run automatically 1 time before failing-->

Thanks to the comments, and sample values – editing config file was not such a big hassle as I was expecting. Just to make it even clearer – I will describe some properties that may not be obvious at the beginning:

  • [line 5] “VSSPROJ” should hold internal path of a project inside VSS.
  • [line 19] “SVNREVPROSPATH” should point into “dbrevprops” that is located right under the folder when SVN repository was created
  • [line 21] “WORKDIR” is a temporary directory used during the migration process. The directory must exist before running migration utility.
I am not sure if I have configured it properly, but it worked for me as a charm. The only disadvantage I can think of is that it is impossible to import all the content of VSS at once. One has to change configuration for every project that needs to be copied to SVN. It just take me about 15 minutes to move 8 solutions (most of them consisting of 3-4 projects).

And at the end… it is a good idea to remove source control bindings before releasing your sources, right? And why do it manually if there is another great tool that does all this work? :)

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