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I need to migrate a customer from SVN to Git, so I wanted first to try svn2git on a public SVN repository.

I have found several public repos, e.g., https://svn.alfresco.com/repos/alfresco-open-mirror/alfresco and http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin. There is no problem of doing svn co, but when I try svn2git, I get the following problem:

D:\Documents\work\svn2git\apache>svn2git http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin Initialized empty Git repository in D:/Documents/work/svn2git/apache/.git/ Using higher level of URL: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin => http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf W: Ignoring error from SVN, path probably does not exist: (160013): Filesystem has no item: REPORT request failed on '/repos/asf/!svn/bc/100': File not found: revision 100, path '/spamassassin' W: Do not be alarmed at the above message git-svn is just searching aggressively for old history. This may take a while on large repositories Checked through r100 Checked through r200 Checked through r300

It ran the whole night, and ended with:

Checked through r22000 Checked through r22100 W: Ignoring error from SVN, path probably does not exist: (175002): RA layer request failed: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos/asf': PROPFIND of '/repos/asf': could not connect to server (http://svn.apache.org) W: Do not be alarmed at the above message git-svn is just searching aggressively for old history. This may take a while on large repositories Checked through r477700 Path 'spamassassin' was probably deleted: RA layer request failed: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos/asf': PROPFIND of '/repos/asf': could not connect to server (http://svn.apache.org) Will attempt to follow revisions r477601 .. r477700 committed before the deletion r477601 .. r477679 OK Checked through r748600 Path 'spamassassin' was probably deleted: RA layer request failed: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos/asf': PROPFIND of '/repos/asf': could not connect to server (http://svn.apache.org) Will attempt to follow revisions r748501 .. r748600 committed before the deletion Checked through r748700 Checked through r748800 Checked through r748900 Checked through r749000 Checked through r749100 Checked through r749200 Checked through r749300 Checked through r749400 W: Ignoring error from SVN, path probably does not exist: (175002): RA layer request failed: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos/asf/!svn/vcc/default': PROPFIND of '/repos/asf/!svn/vcc/default': could not connect to server (http://svn.apache.org) W: Do not be alarmed at the above message git-svn is just searching aggressively for old history. This may take a while on large repositories Checked through r805700 Path 'spamassassin' was probably deleted: RA layer request failed: PROPFIND request failed on '/repos/asf/!svn/vcc/default': PROPFIND of '/repos/asf/!svn/vcc/default': could not connect to server (http://svn.apache.org) Will attempt to follow revisions r805601 .. r805700 committed before the deletion Checked through r805800 Checked through r805900 Checked through r806000 Checked through r806100 Checked through r806200 Checked through r806300 Checked through r806400 Checked through r806500 Checked through r806600 Checked through r806700 command failed: git checkout -f master

Why does it happen? Is it a permission problem?

Alex Karnovsky
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1 Answers1

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Well, so far everything looks fine. If it fails, you should specify with what message it fails.

But besides that, for a one-time migration git-svn (the svn2git tool you use is based on git-svn) is not the right tool for conversions of repositories or parts of repositories. 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 or tools based on it, 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 that is based on git-svn suffers from most of the same drawbacks than pur git-svn, just working around of some of the issues.

You will be easily able to configure svn2gits rule file to produce the result you want from your current SVN layout, including any complex histories that might exist and including producing several Git repos out of one SVN repo or combining different SVN repos into one Git repo cleanly in one run if you like.

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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