canonicalize svn paths even more awesomely It turns out that SVN has bizarre path canonicalization rules that are sort of close to what urllib.quote does, but different in peculiar ways, and 1.7 suddenly cares deeply about canonicality. For instance, space (' ') maps to %20, but '~' stays unchanged instead of turning into %7e. Along with its new policy of frequent beatings administered to users of its bindings, SVN 1.7 introduces a function that idempotently canonicalizes URIs, which I found sort of by accident, because that's how you learn about SVN API changes. Older versions of SVN are less anal, so urllib.quote continues to work fine for them.

#!/bin/sh
mkdir temp
cd temp
svnadmin create repo
svn co file://`pwd`/repo wc
cd wc
mkdir branches trunk tags
svn add *
svn ci -m 'btt'
echo foo > trunk/foo
svn add trunk/foo
svn ci -m 'add file'
svn up
svn cp trunk branches/dev_branch
svn ci -m 'branch'
svn up
svn rm branches
svn ci -m 'delete branches dir'
cd ..
cd ..
svnadmin dump temp/repo > branch_delete_parent_dir.svndump
echo
echo 'Complete.'
echo 'You probably want to clean up temp now.'
echo 'Dump in branch_delete_parent_dir.svndump'
exit 0