Subject: Migrating svn to git with heavy use of externals

From: "D. Stuart Freeman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:59:00 -0400

I'm a developer on the Sakai project.  I think Sakai could benefit
greatly from use of git because we have a huge need to track local
changes while contributing back to a central codebase.  I've started
looking at git-svn and have managed to get a copy of our repository into
git, and looked at the stuff to do with submodules as a replacement for
externals.  The problem is we rely very heavily on externals, for
instance when we make a tag for release we tag all the modules at the
same time and use an externals file to build the release from those
tags.  I realize that's probably not a best practice, but it's what we
do.  Our latest release is here:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/tags/sakai_2-5-0/ if you want
to get an idea of the scope of the problem.  How would you convert this
to a git repository?  I'm currently looking at
http://blog.alieniloquent.com/2008/03/08/git-svn-with-svnexternals/ but
that doesn't look like it would leave all the old release tags intact.

-- 
D. Stuart Freeman
Georgia Institute of Technology