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I tried svn2git to test a migration from svn to git, like this:

svn2git https://my-svn.net/project/ --username $USERNAME

I execute this command where git is installed. I perform this in /home/myuser/svn2git/. After some waiting the execution of the commands end:

...
A   src/xx
A   src/xx
A   src/xx
A   src/xx

I do not see the repository getting downloaded to the location where i am running this command from. After the command runs fine, If i commit and push to GIT i do not see anything getting committed. I see .git folder getting created and on the display with verbose i can see all my history.

Can anyone tell me what is incorrect here?

Wilson Vargas
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Pravi
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1 Answers1

-1

For a one-time migration git-svn is not the right tool for conversions of repositories or parts of a repository. 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 used (the nirvdrum one) is based on git-svn and just tries to work around some of the quirks and drawbacks. In thus that svn2git tool suffers from most of the same drawbacks.

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 and also excluding any paths or branches or tags you don't to have migrated, though I'm always crying a little if someone discards code history which is precious.

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 nirvdrum svn2git 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
  • you can generate annotated tags instead of lightweight tags
  • 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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