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Re: [GSoC] Git to SVN bridge

From
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date
Apr 19, 2012, 22:56 UTC
Message-ID
<20120419225659.GA4971@burratino>
In-Reply-To
<CALkWK0=7SPR-4Km5TUwg+rHm30aC7Uru9GJkkfYnL3OORV7nfg@mail.gmail.com>
Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
> Give 'vcs-svn/' the ability to spit out a Subversion dumpfile.  If you
> remember, we hit a brick wall last time when we needed a way to
> persist mark-referenced-blobs in the fast-import stream.
Yeah.  Ok, let's start there.

If I remember correctly, before we had this idea that svn-fi would be a generic fast-import backend, so we could get support for pushing to Subversion from other version control systems like Mercurial and RCS for free. An earlier idea was to use a very minimal subset of the fast-import format. You started with a patch that taught fast-export a switch to produce that minimal subset, which was rejected because it seemed like too much of a niche use case to be worth the cost to compatibility.

However, that leaves whole swaths of the design space unexplored. For example, maybe "git fast-export" doesn't need to write the restricted format but there would be a filter that takes an arbitrary fast-import stream and converts it to the restricted thing. Or maybe it would be easiest to get something off the ground using that restricted "fast-import lite" format and only afterwards expand svn-fi to handle more commands so it can talk to the rest of the world.

In other words, if you are hitting a wall with that part which doesn't seem to have much to do with differences between git and Subversion anyway, I imagine there are easier places to start. Alternatively, if you prefer to work on making it easy for an importer to handle "ls" and "cat" commands and mark references, I think our previous attempts were misguided and we can do better. :) What do you think?

Jonathan
Previous: Ramkumar RamachandraNext: Ramkumar Ramachandra
Message 4 of 6 in “[GSoC] Git to SVN bridge”
  1. Ramkumar RamachandraApr 6, 2012
  2. Jonathan NiederApr 18, 2012
  3. Ramkumar RamachandraApr 19, 2012
  4. Jonathan NiederApr 19, 2012
  5. Ramkumar RamachandraApr 20, 2012
  6. Jonathan NiederApr 23, 2012

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