Just posting for anyone else with the same question. The question comes down to whether svnsync is only for mirrors or can be used for migration.
Quoting Dave Anderson's input from google groups:
It can be used to perform migration, and it is the only way to perform
migration to Google Code. The warning in the Subversion book should be
read as: "If you want read-only mirrors, make sure that you never
commit anything to it manually, otherwise svnsync will no longer be
able to synchronize from the master repository".
But, internally, svnsync is a trivial program: it requests a stream of
revisions from one server, and replays those revisions in another
server. As long as the target server doesn't diverge (ie. doesn't have
any commits not in the source), then svnsync can be run incrementally
to stay in sync. But you can also just run it once, to sync up two
repositories, then throw away the original and start using the synced
copy.
As for the difference between dump/load and svnsync, the basic
difference is that svnsync works entirely through the public server
API, whereas dump/load operates directly on repository files. Both
mechanisms get you exactly the same data, but implementing only
svnsync is much simpler for us. Implementing dump/load would require
additional development time and resources for not much benefit.
Historically, dump/load was originally easier to have, but over time
the need for a public way to do incremental dump/load became obvious,
and svnsync came into existence.
So, bottom line: yes, use svnsync. If you follow the documentation,
consider Google Code to be your "read only mirror". Once the
synchronization is complete, just delete (or archive and backup :)
your local repository, and start using the Google Code repository as
usual.
Hope this helps,
- Dave
