RE: "merging" two repositories

[Shankar Unni]

Kaz Kylheku wrote:

>   cp -R source/. Target

Better to use "cpio" or "tar" rather than "cp" to copy directories.

The safest way to preserve *everything* is to use the following command
*as root*:

  cd <path_to_old_repository>
  find module1 module2 ... -depth -print | \
                  cpio -pduvm <path_to_new_repository>

This will preserve everything - ownerships, modification times (mostly),
even symlinks. The -depth is important to make cpio see the directory
names after all the file names contained with them, so that it can then
set the timestamps on the directories correctly.

By the way, the GNU textutils sort doesn't seem to have an option to
treat a number as a hex number for numeric sorting. Fortunately, since
the timestamp length is always the same (8), and digits sort before
letters, you can just do

  cat history1 history2 | sort -s -k 1.2,1.9 

(ordinary stable text sorting).