Re: [GSoC update] git-remote-svn: The final one

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 17, 2010, 16:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20100817164125.GE6947@kytes>
In-Reply-To: <27168737.115723.1282062015125.JavaMail.root@mail.hq.genarts.com>

Hi Stephen,

Stephen Bash writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> > > So being selfish, what I care about is an improved method for
> > > converting SVN repos to git repos once and never going back. It
> > > sounds to me like the major hurdles remaining there are getting
> > > svn-fe to handle dumpfile v3 and handling branches/tags. Is that
> > > correct?
> > 
> > We're doing better than that- when the whole thing is complete, we
> > should have perfectly seamless two-way compatibility.
> 
> That makes complete sense.  It just happens I'm interested in a subset of the problem (the order has come down from on high that we will be using git for future development), so I'm curious if/how a one-time conversion simplifies things.

Thanks for bringing this up- it's quite interesting :)

A one-time conversion thing would have changed our priorities. Mainly, I wouldn't have been able to justify the time I invested in building svnrdump. I'd have probably settled for complete mirror + dump using a combination of existing tools. The second difference: svn-dump-fast-export is quite complex; although it was probably an unconcious decision on David's part, it makes a really good generic parser, and I suspect that it'll help us generate the dumpfile we need for loading revision history data back into Subversion. Third, it simplifies the branch/ tag mapper greatly- we'd only need to achieve a perfect one-way mapping. A symmetric mapping is harder for several reasons- consider preserving props for instance.

-- Ram