Is there a clean way to move / to /trunk?

Question

I made the mistake of creating a Subversion repository without the usual trunk, branches, and tags directories. That is, the root directory of the project maps to the root directory of the repository. Now I want to create a feature branch, but there's no good place to put it. What I'd like to do is move / to /trunk, preserving its properties and history. Am I out of luck?

Answer 1

The clean way to do this is using svnadmin to dump out the whole repository using

svnadmin dump 

Then create a new repository with the trunk directory at the root, and reload the dump with

svnadmin load --parent-dir trunk

If you do an svn move then that will mess things up if you ever update back to a revision before the move, since the files will move back to their previous location, which is probably not what you want.

Answer 2

Used therefromhere's answer, which worked fine, but wanted to add the commands including the parameters, i.e. as executed on the svn server's command line:

1. Dump your existing repository into a file:

   svnadmin dump /path/to/myrepo/ > /some/dir/myproject.svndump 

2. Create a new repository:

   svnadmin create /path/to/mynewrepo/ 

3. Add the trunk/ folder and commit it, in the working copy directory:

   mkdir trunk; svn add trunk; svn commit trunk -m "Add: trunk folder" 

4. Load the dumpfile into the new repository using trunk as parent-dir:

   svnadmin load --parent-dir trunk /path/to/mynewrepo/ < /some/dir/myproject.svndump