CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitsvnhistorysvn2git
ThinkmanTP
ThinkmanTP

Reputation: 33

SVN to Git with History?

For years, we have used SVN for our repository, and we want to migrate to Git. In 2015 someone made a change in one of our repositories. He made a separate folder in the repository (with an subfolder), on the same folder hierarchical level like /trunk, /branch and /tags. (see projectA)

svnroot/
|-- projectA
    |-- branches
    |-- tags
    |-- trunk
    |-- new folder
        |-- subfolder
            |-- branches
            |-- tags
            |-- trunk
|-- projectB
    |-- branches
    |-- tags
    |-- trunk
|-- projectC
    |-- branches
    |-- tags
    |-- trunk

He has moved some parts from /trunk and other folders to this new folder. When I now look in the history of the new folder, I see only the history since the new folder was created, but the history of the moved projects in the new folder seems to be complete. Did I need to fix it in SVN before migration, and if this is needed how can I fix this? Or must I do something special on migration?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 5394

Answers (1)

Vampire
Vampire

Reputation: 38639

git-svn 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, but svn2git which is much more suited for this use-case.

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.

You will be easily able to configure svn2gits rule file to produce the result you want with your history, either with integrating all SVN sub-repos in one Git repo, or splitting your projects from SVN to multiple independent Git repositories.

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

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

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions