Work-around for failing "git svn clone" (requiring full history)

Question

I want to convert a Subversion repository sub-directory (denoted by module here) into a git repository with full history. There are many svn copy operations (Subversion people call them branches) in the history of my Subversion repository. The release policy has been that after each release or other branches created, the old URL is left unused and the new URL replaces the old one for containing the work.

Optimally, by my reading, it seems like this should do the trick:

$ git svn clone --username=mysvnusername --authors-file=authors.txt \
    --follow-parent \
    http://svnserver/svn/src/branches/x/y/apps/module module

(where branches/x/y/ depicts the newest branch). But I got an error, which looks something like this:

W: Ignoring error from SVN, path probably does not exist: (160013): Filesystem has no item: '/svn/src/!svn/bc/100/branches/x/y/apps/module' path not found
W: Do not be alarmed at the above message git-svn is just searching aggressively for old history.

(Update: Adding option --no-minimize-url to the above does not remove the error message.)

The directory module get created and populated, but the Subversion history past the newest svn copy commit is not imported (the git repository created ends up having just two commits when I expected hundreds).

The question is, how to export the full Subversion history in the presence of this situation?

Possible Cause

1. Searching for the error message, I found this: git-svn anonymous checkout fails with -s which linked to this Subversion issue: http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3242

   What I understand by my reading, something in Subversion 1.5 changed about how the client accesses the repository. With newer Subversion, if there is no read access to some super directory of the URL path (true for me, svn ls http://svnserver/svn fails with 403 Forbidden), then we fail with some Subversion operations.

2. Jeff Fairley in his answer points out that spaces in the Subversion URL might also cause this error message (confirmed by user Owen). Have a look at his solution to see how he solved the case if your git svn clone is failing for the same resson.

3. Dejay Clayton in his answer reveals that if the deepest subdirectory components in branch and tag svn urls are equally named (e.g. .../tags/release/1.0.0 and .../branches/release-candidates/1.0.0) then this error could occur.

Answer 1

I ran into this problem when I had identically-named subdirectories within branches or tags.

For example, I had tags candidates/1.0.0 and releases/1.0.0, and this caused the documented error because subdirectory 1.0.0 appears within both candidates and releases.

Per git-svn docs:

When using multiple --branches or --tags, git svn does not automatically handle name collisions (for example, if two branches from different paths have the same name, or if a branch and a tag have the same name). In these cases, use init to set up your Git repository then, before your first fetch, edit the $GIT_DIR/config file so that the branches and tags are associated with different name spaces.

So while the following command failed due to similarly named candidates and releases tags:

git svn clone --authors-file=../authors.txt --no-metadata \
    --trunk=/trunk --branches=/branches --tags=/candidates \
    --tags=/releases --tags=/tags -r 100:HEAD \
    --prefix=origin/ \
    svn://example.com:3692/my-repos/path/to/project/

the following sequence of commands did work:

git svn init --no-metadata \
    --trunk=/trunk --branches=/branches --tags=/tags \
    --prefix=origin/ \
    'svn://example.com:3692/my-repos/path/to/project/'

git config --add svn-remote.svn.tags \
    'path/to/project/candidates/*:refs/remotes/origin/tags/Candidates/*'

git config --add svn-remote.svn.tags \
    'path/to/project/releases/*:refs/remotes/origin/tags/Releases/*'

git svn fetch --authors-file=../authors.txt -r100:HEAD

Note that this only worked because there were no other conflicts within branches and tags. If there were, I would have had to resolve them similarly.

After successfully cloning the SVN repository, I then executed the following steps in order to: turn SVN tags into GIT tags; turn trunk into master; turn other references into branches; and relocate remote paths:

# Make tags into true tags
cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin/tags/* .git/refs/tags/
rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin/tags

# Make other references into branches
cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin/* .git/refs/heads/
rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin
cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/* .git/refs/heads/ # May be missing; that's okay
rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes

# Change 'trunk' to 'master'
git checkout trunk
git branch -d master
git branch -m trunk master