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
#
# Generate simple_branch.svndump
#

mkdir temp
cd temp

mkdir project-orig
cd project-orig
mkdir trunk branches tags
cd ..

svnadmin create testrepo
svnurl=file://`pwd`/testrepo
svn import --username durin project-orig $svnurl -m "Empty dirs."

svn co $svnurl project
cd project
echo 'file: alpha' > trunk/alpha
svn add trunk/alpha
svn ci --username durin -m 'Add alpha'
echo 'Data of beta' > trunk/beta
svn add trunk/beta
svn ci --username durin -m 'Add beta'
svn up
svn cp trunk branches/the_branch
svn ci --username durin -m 'Make a branch'
cd ..

svnadmin dump testrepo > ../simple_branch.svndump