git-svn starting with an empty svn repository

[Penny Leach <penny@mjollnir.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2581 bytes --]

Dear list,

This is maybe an abuse of what git-svn is designed to do, but nevertheless
I need to do it.

I'm working with a project (Moodle) that still uses CVS for its upstream
VCS.  The friendly folk at Catalyst in NZ run a git import of this, that a
lot of the community uses as their (read only) upstream instead of CVS.

So far so good.

However, now for various political reasons, I must (at least) publish
changes to SVN.  I'm going to be patch trading a lot between my work
branches, and Moodle's CVS directly and I don't want to lose the power that
git gives me while doing that.  So I want to keep git as the tool I use for
development, that acts as a go-between for me between CVS and SVN.

So what I'd really like to do is something like this:

- clone from Catalyst's git mirror
- push that to SVN using git-svn
- keep working, committing patches to Moodle CVS, and pulling from Catalyst
  regularly, while pushing both my local changes and new pulled upstream
  patches, to SVN, using git-svn

The problem seems to be that I'm starting out with an *empty* SVN
repository.  Almost all of the documentation I've found on this topic is
for going from an existing SVN repository to git.

Theoretically at least, the opposite direction should also be possible, but
I'm having a hard time figuring it out.  I followed the steps outlined in
the comments here:
http://quirkygba.blogspot.com/2007/10/using-git-with-google-code-hosting.html

But I didn't have much luck, it seems as though the rebased trunk branch
doesn't share any ancestry with the original Catalyst sources, so regularly
updating is going to be hard (unless I create graft entries for each time I
do it I guess?).

Not to mention the fact that it's 8 years of history that takes a while to
import and after about 5 tries I didn't even manage to get git svn to
dcommit it and got impatient and cross and stopped trying.

So really I want to know is - is this even possible? Is using the above
steps along with the graft approach the best|only way to do it?  How
brittle is this to maintain, if I even manage to get it imported?

Any ideas or advice?

For reference, the CVS/Git import can be cloned here:
http://git.catalyst.net.nz/git/moodle-r2.git but will take a long time to
come down.

Cheers for any help.

Penny


-- 
/* ---------------------------------------------------
Penny Leach | http://mjollnir.org | http://she.geek.nz
GPG: 8347 00FC B5BF 6CC0 0FC9 AB90 1875 120A A30E C22B
--------------------------------------------------- */

[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 197 bytes --]