Re: CVS -> SVN -> Git

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Jul 15, 2007, 02:30 UTC
Message-ID: <20070715023035.GX4436@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <7154c5c60707141623s3f70e967s226e5da29965a173@mail.gmail.com>

David Frech <david@nimblemachines.com> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Now I want to switch to git. I've since added enough to svn that there
> is no option but to use th svn repo as my source. git-svnimport
> doesn't work for me because its idea of the structure of my repo is
> too limited. I looked around, stumbled over fast-import, and got
> hooked on the idea of using it. It seemed simple enough... I wrote a
> 350-line Lua (!!) program that parses the svn dump file and creates a
> commit stream for fast-import.
> 
> It took a day and half to get the svn dump parsing right (it's an
> egregiously bad format) but only a couple of hours to write the
> fast-import backend.

With the 'C' (copy) and 'R' (rename) operators in fast-import I was starting to suspect that an SVN dump->fast-import stream translator wasn't going to be that complex.

I wouldn't want to attempt to parse the SVN dump format directly in fast-import. As you said the format is horribly difficult to read. The entire fast-import stream parser is only 624 lines of C (the other 1,636 lines of fast-import are for documentation, the in memory tree/branch management and packfile generation). I doubt the SVN dump file can be parsed in as few lines of C code.

-- 
Shawn.