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gitsvnsvn2git

Converting SVN repo to git


I have a pretty large svn repository with a structure similar to below. I have multiple repositories/projects within one big project. I have been setting up svn2git to transfer svn to git, but it seems like I have to do each single project one by one. Is there an easier/more automatic way to move this svn repo to git? I do want to make sure I keep the commit history, etc.

I'm not entirely sure if this command would put each "project" into it's own folder: svn2git https://my_repo/svn/my_repository

The one problem I could see is that some of these project folders are not following the conventional trunk and tags structure. Any ideas how I could achieve this?

my_repository
    project1
          trunk
               ...
           tags
               1.0.0
               1.0.1
               1.0.2

     project2
           trunk
               ...
           tags
               1.0.5
               1.0.6
               1.0.7

      project3
           src
               ...
           file1
           file2

       project4
            trunk
               ...
            tags
               1.0.5
               1.0.6
               1.0.7

Solution

  • There are pleny 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.

    From you question I see that you are not using this svn2git, but the ruby one that is based on git-svn which is not the right tool for one-time 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.

    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.

    You can easily configure the tool with its rules file to make exactly what you want, including differeing layouts for projects and splitting your SVN root into multiple Git repositories however you like.


    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

    There are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)