Converting a Subversion repository to Git

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complete guide to git-svn conversions

Our goal is to do a complete conversion of our Subversion repository and end up with a bare Git repository acceptable for sharing with others (privately or publicly). Bare repositories are ones without a local working checkout of the files available for modifications. They are the recommended format for shared repositories.

1. Retrieve a list of all Subversion committers

Subversion simply lists the username for each commit. Git’s commits have much richer data, but at its simplest, the commit author needs to have a name and email listed. By default the git-svn tool will just list the SVN username in both the author and email fields. But with a little bit of work, you can create a list of all SVN users and what their corresponding Git name and emails are. This list can be used by git-svn to transform plain svn usernames into proper Git committers.

From the root of your local Subversion checkout, run this command:

svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors-transform.txt

That will grab all the log messages, pluck out the usernames, eliminate any duplicate usernames, sort the usernames and place them into a “authors-transform.txt” file. Now edit each line in the file. For example, convert:

jwilkins = jwilkins <jwilkins>

into this:

jwilkins = John Albin Wilkins <[email protected]>

2. Clone the Subversion repository using git-svn

git svn clone [SVN repo URL] --no-metadata -A authors-transform.txt --stdlayout ~/temp

This will do the standard git-svn transformation (using the authors-transform.txt file you created in step 1) and place the git repository in the “~/temp” folder inside your home directory.

3. Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore

If your svn repo was using svn:ignore properties, you can easily convert this to a .gitignore file using:

cd ~/temp
git svn show-ignore > .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m 'Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore.'

4. Push repository to a bare git repository

First, create a bare repository and make its default branch match svn’s “trunk” branch name.

git init --bare ~/new-bare.git
cd ~/new-bare.git
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/trunk

Then push the temp repository to the new bare repository.

cd ~/temp
git remote add bare ~/new-bare.git
git config remote.bare.push 'refs/remotes/*:refs/heads/*'
git push bare

You can now safely delete the ~/temp repository.

5. Rename “trunk” branch to “master”

Your main development branch will be named “trunk” which matches the name it was in Subversion. You’ll want to rename it to Git’s standard “master” branch using:

cd ~/new-bare.git
git branch -m trunk master

6. Clean up branches and tags

git-svn makes all of Subversions tags into very-short branches in Git of the form “tags/name”. You’ll want to convert all those branches into actual Git tags using:

cd ~/new-bare.git
git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/tags |
cut -d / -f 4 |
while read ref
do
git tag "$ref" "refs/heads/tags/$ref";
git branch -D "tags/$ref";
done

This step will take a bit of typing. 🙂 But, don’t worry; your unix shell will provide a > secondary promptfor the extra-long command that starts with git for-each-ref.

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