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I'm using svn2git to migrate a svn repo to a git repo. The svn repo is pretty big. The first thing I tried was:

$ mkdir repo
$ cd repo
$ svn2git https://svn/repo/ --revision 1:40000 --username xxx

This started well but after some houres I got:

error: waitpid for git-svn failed: No child processes Could not read response body: SSL error: A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.

Now I want to split my svn2git command in several steps. Like this:

$ mkdir repo
$ cd repo
$ svn2git https://svn/repo/ --revision 1:1000 --username xxx
$ svn2git https://svn/repo/ --revision 1000:2000 --username xxx
$ svn2git https://svn/repo/ --revision 2000:3000 --username xxx
...

I know it's an ugly way but I see no other option at the moment. Will this give me in the end the same solution as 1:40000 or will it overwrite it? I tried to check with du -sh repo/ but the size is always different (not always growing) so I don't know.

DenCowboy
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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.

The svn2git tool you use is based on git-svn and thus suffers from most of the same drawbacks as direct git-svn does.

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 (or the svn2git you used) 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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  • interesting, but not an answer to my question. – DenCowboy Apr 20 '17 at 06:08
  • Well, it is the solution to your underlying problem. You will not get such errors and you don't have to wait that many hours, besides the other pros. You said you see no other option, so this is the answer to the implied question whether there is another option and thus can be seen as answer to your question. ;-) – Vampire Apr 20 '17 at 07:09