How to use svn2git on repository

Question

I'm using svn2git to test the migration of an svn repo to a git. Now my svn is build like thise

myproj contains

repo1 /
repo2 (obsolete)/
old/

Every repo contains its own branches, tags etc. I only need everything which is in repo1. When I start the process I get this:

svn2git https://server/myproj/repo1 --username LVO

output:

Initialized empty Git repository in /folder/.git/
Using higher level of URL: https://server/myproj/repo1 => https://server/myproj

And than the process starts. I'm afraid it's taking all the other old repo's too. Is this the right way to start it?:

$ svn2git https://server/myproj/repo1 --username xxx --trunk=/repo1 --branches=/repo1 --tags=/repo1 

(especially the trunk thing is not clear for me). How do I have to launch svn2git when my repo is in this tree.

Answer 1

For a one-time migration git-svn is not the right tool for conversions of repositories or parts of repositories. 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.

The svn2git tool you use is based on git-svn and thus suffers from most of the same drawbacks, only fixing some in the post-clone actions.

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.

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.

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.

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Even though git-svn (or the svn2git that is based on it) 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

You see, there are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)