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

RSVN="`pwd`/rsvn.py"
export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
mkdir temp
cd temp

svnadmin create repo
svn co file://`pwd`/repo wc

cd wc
mkdir trunk branches
cd trunk
for a in alpha beta gamma ; do
    echo $a > $a
done
cd ..
svn add *
svn ci -m 'initial'

svn up
svn cp trunk branches/test
svn ci -m 'branch'

svn up
echo foo >> branches/test/alpha
svn ci -m 'Mod.'

cd ..
echo rdelete trunk > tmp
echo rcopy branches/test trunk >> tmp
python $RSVN --message=blah --username=evil `pwd`/repo < tmp

svnadmin dump repo > ../replace_trunk_with_branch.svndump