I have a few questions about the Subversion open source project. I know that there are multiple versions of svndumpfilter (2,3). What are the tradeoffs and benefits of each version? In other words, what problems does each version seek to address?
There are known bugs in the original svndumpfilter that have not been resolved for years. Out of curiosity, why is this the case? Is it because svndumpfilter is of lower priority than the other working components of svn?
Well, there’s multiple versions of Subversion itself, so technically you should just go look at the changelog for the releases.
I think you’ll find the differences are related to the times when the svn repository format changes, svn itself will happily (and silently) upgrade your working copy, and you can easily upgrade your server repo if you start using a new version of svn, the dumpfilter that you get with the server would just have been modified to work with the new formats.
Bugs, svndumpfilter is a tool that has certain limited uses, as a result it doesn’t get modified much as people don;t tend to use it very often. Its also open source, so if someone really had a need to fix a particular bug in it, they would have (or paid someone else to do so). I don’t know if that means “lower priority” or not, maybe “less resourced” would be a better term.
1