How to get rid of this large svn revision file

Question

-rw-r–r– 1 www-data www-data 11G Mar 26 10:06 /home/repos/db/revs/121129

content in this revs (121129) file is not required.

Can I truncate ">/home/repos/db/revs/121129" or edit this file directly? Will this effects other revision create after this revision. my current running rev is 121406

Please let me know how to get rid of this revision as it effecting my backup and maintenance. currently I am excluding this file from my tar backup.

Any alternative for svndumpfilter?

Answer 1

No, you can't remove a revision file like that, I tried it myself and I ended up in a corrupted repository. As far as I know, the problem is that svn has an index of all files it knows about, and if you commit a file that happens to be identicall to a previous file, the new revision will have a pointer to the old file rather than a copy.

So I strongly recommend you to use svndumpfilter.

Answer 2

The svndumpfilter is the appropriate (and only) method to remove a revision.

Your current backup process will leave you with a corrupted/unusable repository. IOW, your backup is useless - it's barely a step above not having one at all.