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I'm migrating our SVN to Git. Our Jenkins job expects a specific folder, which in some branches can be empty. Thus, I have provided the --preserve-empty-dirs argument to the git svn clone --preserve-empty-dirs --prefix "" ....

Unfortunately this fails always at the same revision with the following message:

Found possible branch point: http://<svn>/tags/2008-03-26-1000-BINDING, 656
Found branch parent: (refs/remotes/tags/2008-03-26-1000-BINDING) cc93e7405337b31d9fce7ec28ab67a9ac3af3811
Following parent with do_switch
couldn't truncate file at /usr/share/perl5/Git.pm line 1410.

Without the --preserve-empty-dirs flag, I can clone it successfully. Is there any workaround for this issue?

git version 2.11.0, svn version 1.9.5

Vampire
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ilhami visne
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  • I could continue with git svn fetch till the next error. And again it continues fetching the revisions. When I let it continue fetching as many times as there are such breaks, can I be sure at the end that everthing is correctly cloned? – ilhami visne Apr 03 '17 at 15:34
  • Is this about a one-time conversion and you only use Git thereafter, or do you want to commit back to SVN from your Git clone? – Vampire Apr 05 '17 at 16:07
  • It is one-time only. We will stop using SVN after the migration. – ilhami visne Apr 06 '17 at 07:35

1 Answers1

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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 and you can also tell it to keep empty directories by giving it a commandline option that causes it to put empty .gitignore files in the directories to keep them.

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. :-)

Vampire
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