# repotool(1) Manual Page

## 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 page.