Git -> SVN importing

Git -> SVN importing

[Tim Visher]

Hello Everyone,

In light of company decisions that are yet to be known, we may in the
future be stuck using svn.  My team and I really want to experiment
with Git, but one of the concerns that my supervisor brought up was
that in the future we want to be sure that we can relatively
painlessly bring the history into svn if required.  Obviously, it's
expected that we would loose the local branching history, but we would
want at least the published information to be sucked back into svn
without change, if that's possible.

I figured that someone would have to have done this before since
git-svn is so magical.  However, I thought I'd ask.

What's the story?

-- 

In Christ,

Timmy V.

http://burningones.com/
http://five.sentenc.es/ - Spend less time on e-mail

Re: Git -> SVN importing

[Bruce Stephens]

Tim Visher <tim.visher@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

> I figured that someone would have to have done this before since
> git-svn is so magical.  However, I thought I'd ask.
>
> What's the story?

My guess is there aren't many people who've migrated from git to svn.
(And fewer who'd admit to it on this mailing list.)

[...]

Re: Git -> SVN importing

[Edward Z. Yang]

Tim Visher wrote:
> I figured that someone would have to have done this before since
> git-svn is so magical.  However, I thought I'd ask.

You want to look at git svn dcommit.

Re: Git -> SVN importing

[Daniel Barkalow]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Tim Visher wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
> 
> In light of company decisions that are yet to be known, we may in the
> future be stuck using svn.  My team and I really want to experiment
> with Git, but one of the concerns that my supervisor brought up was
> that in the future we want to be sure that we can relatively
> painlessly bring the history into svn if required.  Obviously, it's
> expected that we would loose the local branching history, but we would
> want at least the published information to be sucked back into svn
> without change, if that's possible.
> 
> I figured that someone would have to have done this before since
> git-svn is so magical.  However, I thought I'd ask.
> 
> What's the story?

What other people have done in similar situations is use git on their 
workstations as an extra-nice svn client, keeping the official history 
svn-compatible (and actually stored in svn) until relevant management is 
convinced that git is the way to go. I don't think anybody's written code 
to import a general git history as well as possible into svn.

The fundamental issue is that svn doesn't have any way to represent that a 
branch's history includes two sets of commits which were done in parallel, 
and it's impossible to automatically distribute merge conflict resolutions 
over the series that led to the merge, which means that you can't really 
produce a reasonable representation of the intermediate steps on the 
second branch.

That is, you'd not only lose the local branching history, but some of the 
middle commits in the resulting linear history would be bogus, with 
content which is not like what the author actually did.

	-Daniel
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