Git SVN clone with complex structure

3
votes

I need to clone an SVN repository to git. The SVN repository is structured as if it's a repository of repositories, like so:

SVNRepo
|____ProjectA
|    |___branches
|    |___tags
|    |___trunk
|            file
|____ProjectB
|    |___branches
|    |___tags
|    |___trunk
             file

I need to clone the repository so that I end up with a single git repository, without the svn specific folders (branches, tags, trunk). I originally dumped then split the SVN repo into separate repos for each project and migrated to git using git svn clone with the --stdlayout command. This worked but came with it's own issues that have been vetoed by our team.

I tried the git svn clone with the --stdlayout command but that doesn't work. I end up with an empty git repo with 2 commits (out of hundreds) and no actual files. There were no errors so I'm not sure what happened.

Trying git svn clone without the --stdlayout sort of works, in that I get a single git repo with all files and history. However, I still have all of the branches, tags and trunk folders which I've like to remove.

I've considered dumping the SVN repo and using sed to edit the binary but that seems like a lot of work. I imagine someone else has encountered this and solved the problem but can't find anything that works.

2
gitsvngit-svn

2 Answers

0
votes

You can set up multiple trunk, branches and tags locations in git svn's configuration. If they are being created from the same parents, git-svn will figure it out. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-svn

0
votes

For a one-time migration git-svn is not the right tool for conversions of repositories or repository parts. It is a great tool if you want to use Git as frontend for an existing SVN server, but for one-time conversions you should not use git-svn, but svn2git which is much more suited for this use-case.

There are plenty tools called svn2git, the probably best one is the KDE one from https://github.com/svn-all-fast-export/svn2git. I strongly recommend using that svn2git tool. It is the best I know available out there and it is very flexible in what you can do with its rules files.

You will be easily able to configure svn2gits rule file to produce the result you want from your current SVN layout.

If you are not 100% about the history of your repository, svneverever from http://blog.hartwork.org/?p=763 is a great tool to investigate the history of an SVN repository when migrating it to Git.

Even though git-svn is easier to start with, here are some further reasons why using the KDE svn2git instead of git-svn is superior, besides its flexibility:

  • the history is rebuilt much better and cleaner by svn2git (if the correct one is used), this is especially the case for more complex histories with branches and merges and so on
  • the tags are real tags and not branches in Git
  • with git-svn the tags contain an extra empty commit which also makes them not part of the branches, so a normal fetch will not get them until you give --tags to the command as by default only tags pointing to fetched branches are fetched also. With the proper svn2git tags are where they belong
  • if you changed layout in SVN you can easily configure this with svn2git, with git-svn you will loose history eventually
  • with svn2git you can also split one SVN repository into multiple Git repositories easily
  • or combine multiple SVN repositories in the same SVN root into one Git repository easily
  • the conversion is a gazillion times faster with the correct svn2git than with git-svn

You see, there are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)