NAME

       repotool - operate on a CVS, SVN, git, bzr, hg, or darcs repository in a uniform way

SYNOPSIS

       repotool [(-v |-q)] 'command' [args...]

DESCRIPTION

       repotool is a script wrapper around repository operations that differ by version-control system. It is
       little use by itself, existing mainly to generate and simplify a conversion makefile usable with
       reposurgeon(1).

       Not all actions are supported on all systems. You will get an error message and a return value of 1 when
       attempting an unsupported action.

       With the -v option, report the commands executed just before they are run. With the -q option, only fatal
       errors are printed instead of non-fatal grips. The -q and -v options also disable each other and only the
       last one will take effect.

       The "initialize" option takes a project name (and, optionally, following source and target VCS types) and
       generates a Makefile that will sequence various steps of a repository conversion. It also generates stub
       lift and options files. This is meant to be run in an empty work directory, the tool will refuse to step
       on any of these files that already exist. Afterwards, you will need to set some variables in the
       Makefile; read its header comment.

       The 'export' action, run from within a repository directory, dumps a copy of a CVS, Subversion, git, bzr,
       hg, or darcs repository to a flat history file readable by reposurgeon. The format is usually a
       git-fast-import stream, except that Subversion repositories export as Subversion dump files; the point is
       to be a lossless representation, or as close to one as possible.

       The 'tags' option, run from within a repository directory, returns a list of the repository’s release
       tags.

       The 'branches' option, run from within a repository directory , returns a list of the repository’s branch
       names.

       The 'checkout' option checks out a working copy of the repository. It must be called from within the
       repository. It takes one required argument - the checkout directory location.

       The checkout option may take a revision, tag, or branch specification, given with the -r, -t, or -b
       options. If you specify multiple conflicting specifications, the revision takes precedence, then the tag,
       then the branch. If the spec is omitted, the tip of the main line of the repository will be used; this is
       equivalent to specifying branch 'master' (git terminology, which is translated by reposurgeon to 'trunk'
       or whatever the underlying VCS uses). In VCSs like SVN where branches and tags are not part of the
       history model, it is possible to specify both a revision and a branch or tag specification to get the
       contents of the branch or tag as seen from the given revision. With these VCS types, you can also use the
       --nobranch option to checkout the complete repository instead, where all branches and tags are simply
       subdirectories. You can also use the --accept-missing option to let 'repotool checkout' return a dangling
       symlink instead of stopping its execution when the asked branch or tag has not been found in the SVN
       namespace (this is currently the default for SVN repositories that are yet checked out). With most DVCS
       checkouts, the -r, -t, and -b options are essentially synonyms. If given a -c option, checkout is
       performed from the directory specified; this may be convenient when working with CVS or Subversion in
       order to select the repository directory.

       The 'compare' action takes two repository directories. It may optionally take a tag-branch-revision spec
       as for the checkout option. You can also pass two revisions separated by a colon to the -r option, to
       have the first one checked out in the first repository and the second one in the second repository. That
       permits one to compare two different revisions, or the same revision referenced differently in two VCS.
       You can leave one of the two revisions empty, then the -r option will not be passed to the corresponding
       repository checkout. This is useful to compare a git tag or branch to the corresponding tag or branch in
       SVN as seen at a particular revision (specifying both a branch and revision makes sense in SVN, but not
       in git). The --no-branch option is passed to the individual checkout commands which means that in cases
       where it makes sense the complete repository will be checked out flatly, treating branch and tag
       namespaces as simple directories. You can also use the --accept-missing option to use an empty directory
       as the checkout if the asked branch or tag cannot be found, instead of erroring out without any
       comparison. This is useful when if the other repository uses empty content for deleted refs. The selected
       versions are compared with diff -q -r, with noise due to SCCS/RCS/CVS keyword expansion ignored. You can
       follow the command verb with one or more -x options followed by basenames of paths to exclude from
       comparison. You can get a context-diff report on file differences with the -u option. File permissions
       well as content are checked, any mismatches will be shown after the diff listing. The -e option sets
       exclude patterns for tag names abd branches that should be ignored.

       The 'compare-tags' action takes two repository directories, extracts a list of tags from the first, then
       compares the repository contents at each tag in the list, generating a compare report for each. You can
       follow the command verb with one or more -x options followed by basenames of paths to exclude from
       comparison. You can get a context-diff report on file differences with the -u option.

       The 'compare-branches' action takes two repository directories, extracts a list of branches common to
       both, then compares the repository contents at each branch in the list, generating a compare report for
       each. You can follow the command verb with one or more -x options followed by basenames of paths to
       exclude from comparison. You can get a context-diff report on file differences with the -u option.

       The 'compare-all' action takes two repository directories, and runs all three above compare actions on
       them. Even if the same name is a tag in one repository and a branch in the other, it will compare them
       against each other. Not distinguishing them is useful as CVS tags that are not applied to every file in
       the repository may get converted to branches. The options are the same as 'compare-tags'.

       The 'mirror' action makes or updates a local mirror of a Subversion, CVS, git, or hg repo. It requires a
       single argument, either a repository URL or the name of a local mirror directory created by a previous
       run. The first form creates a local mirror of the repository in a directory named after the last segment
       of the URL, with the suffix "-mirror" (the local mirror name can be overridden by an optional second
       argument). The second form updates the local mirror, doing an incremental fetch; just give the mirror
       directory name.

       Subversion URLs are as specified in the public documentation for Subversion. CVS URLs must specify a host
       and repository path, followed by a '#', followed by a module name. URLs for git and hg should be in the
       form normally used for clone commands

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       This program uses the $TMPDIR environment variable, defaulting to '/tmp' if it is not set.

RETURN VALUES

       1 on invalid arguments or if a command called by the script failed, 0 otherwise. A return value of 0 on a
       compare operation does not necessarily indicate a clean comparison; only empty output does that.

BUGS

       Tag comparisons with git will not cope well with a branch name containing the string "detached".

       Due to extreme slowness of the Subversion checkout operation, the compare head, tag, and branch modes
       assume that if one of the directories is a Subversion checkout you have done a full checkout of HEAD
       before calling this tool; thus no svn update operation is required unless you give an -r option. Spurious
       errors will be reported if the directory is not a full checkout of HEAD. To avoid this optimization and
       force updating, do "-r HEAD".

REQUIREMENTS

       The export action is a wrapper around either native export facilities or the following engines:
       cvs-fast-export(1) (for CVS), svnadmin(1) (for SVN), hg-fast-export.py(1) (for hg). You must have the
       appropriate engine in your $PATH for whatever kind of repository you are streaming.

            [[see_also]]
           == SEE ALSO ==

       reposurgeon(1).

AUTHOR

       Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>. This tool is distributed with reposurgeon; see the project
       <http://www.catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon> page" .

                                                   2023-01-20                                        REPOTOOL(1)