Subject: git-svnimport

From: Christian Wiese <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:00:11 +0200

Hello folks,

I'd like to use git-svnimport to mirror the subprojects within our svn
repository, but I encountered some pitfalls while testing.

Our Layout is like this:

<SVN_Repository_Root>/{subproject-a,subproject-b}/{trunk,branches,tags}

From the documentation of git-svnimport I assumed that I can use:
------------------------------------------------------
$ git-svnimport -v <SVN_Repository_Root>/subproject-a
------------------------------------------------------
to just fetch subproject-a, but the import fails with an error like
this:
-------snip--------------------------------------------------------------
40: Unrecognized path: /subproject-b/tags
40: Unrecognized path: /subproject-b/trunk
41: Unrecognized path: /subproject-a/trunk/foo/bar.txt
42: Unrecognized path: /subproject-a/trunk/foo/bar.txt
43: Unrecognized path: /subproject-a/trunk/foo/bar.txt
Generating pack...
Done counting 0 objects.
Nothing new to pack.
Removing unused objects 100%...
Done.
DONE; creating master branch
cp: cannot stat `/repos/test/tmp/.git/refs/heads/origin':
No such file or directory
fatal: master: not a valid SHA1
-------snip--------------------------------------------------------------

What am I doing wrong ?

When I am using:
--------------------------------------------------------
$ git-svnimport -v -T subproject-a <SVN_Repository_Root>
--------------------------------------------------------
it gets happily imported.

So I have the impression that the described <SVN_repository_URL> in
the documentation of git-svnimport is in fact the Repository Root of the
svn repo.

For me it looks like git-svnimport makes the assumption that most svn
repos are organized in the following way:

<SVN_repository_URL>/{trunk,branches,tags}/{subproject-a,subproject-b}

I have never seen svn repos organized that way if there are more than
one project inside a repo, and it is even not recommended by the svn
people as we can see here:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn-book.html#svn.branchmerge.maint.layout

So the assumption of git-svnimport, that trunk, branches and tags are
always top-level directories is unlikely the case in most svn
deployments. Most subprojects hosted in a svn repo have their own
trunk, branches and tags directories.

I think the '-P' option of git-svnimport should rather define the
relative path of the subproject from the svn repository root than from
a trunk toplevel directory, which is not existing in most cases.

It might be even useful to rename <SVN_repository_URL> to
<SVN_Repository_Root>

-P <Path_from_SVN_Repository_Root>
	By default, the whole  repository is imported.
	-P my/proj will import starting only from my/proj.
	This option is useful when you want to import one project from
	a svn repo which hosts multiple projects, that have their own
	trunk, branches and tags directory structure.

<SVN_Repository_Root>/<Path_from_SVN_Repository_Root>/{trunk,branches,tags}

As far as I can see now that would ease the use of git-svnimport a lot
and would help people to migrate from svn to git as well.

Any suggestions are highly welcome!

Thanks in advance.
Cheers
--Chris