git-svn and migration

Hi there!

I've been playing around with git for a while, read the guides to git-svn and have been successfully using it on my own to track an upstream svn repository.

Eventually, I'd like us all to switch to git, throw out the svn server, and replace it with a git repository that can be pushed to, where commits that pass tests get merged into the master.

But - that's not going to happen overnight. The most likely next steps are going to be something like migrating a couple of other developers onto git to test the water, but in the interim most people will still be on svn.

Has anyone got any tips as I'm sure it's a path trodden before? I've seen examples of keeping a read-only svn, but that's not really what I'm after. I'm considering whether to have a central git repo regularly pull from svn so that it's up to date, and having us possibly push to svn (or git if it's not merged to trunk) as an interim step..

Nigel

On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 04:50:30PM +0000, Nigel Magnay wrote:

Using a central git repo that is kept uptodate with svn is the approach I've used. git-svn isn't especially keen on this mode of operation, however. After every fetch, you have to reset refs/remotes/trunk to origin/master, which it turn puts .git/svn out of date (you can blow it away and run "git svn fetch" to regenerate it).

I wrote a script that automates most of this stuff (including doing incremental additions to git-svn's revdb/revmap). If there's interest, I can see about cleaning it up for general consumption.

On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 12:54:47PM -0500, Steven Walter <stevenrwalter@gmail.com> wrote:

an other problem is that you probably want to have a bare repo while git-svn needs a working dir. a possible solution:

http://blogs.frugalware.org/vmiklos/2007/12/09/p320

(it works for me fine, but maybe there are problems with it so use with care :) )

- VMiklos

I was prepared to put up with it not being a bare repository (asides the extra /.git/ in the URL it's pretty much the same).

On the git host I'd set refs/heads/trunk to be
 ref: refs/remotes/svn/trunk

And I'm hoping that a cron of git svn fetch ; git-update-server-info will do the trick. It appeared to keep it in sync when I fetch downstream. I don't know if I'm being naive though expecting that to work as I don't grok all that git-svn needs to work properly - but I'm working on it ;-)

My current plan is for developers to push/pull to git to share amongst the git-devs, and to push to svn when wanting to share with everyone else..

[svn user] ---(ci/co)--->[svn] --pull--> [git]
                            ^               ^
                           |               |
                          push          push/pull
                            |               |
                           ---[git user]----

On Dec 19, 2007 8:23 PM, Miklos Vajna < vmiklos@frugalware.org> wrote:

 > > however.  After every fetch, you have to reset refs/remotes/trunk to
 > > origin/master, which it turn puts .git/svn out of date (you can blow it

 >

 >

 >

"Nigel Magnay" <nigel.magnay@gmail.com> writes:

I suspect having the git users push/fetch only from svn would be more reliable. Won't there be problems if git users do merges and push to the git repo?

Also, seems like it makes the transition more complicateds for git users since they have to figure out git-svn _and_ the git push/pull.

Perhaps avoid the central git repo until everyone is on git. Then people have to learn not to use git-svn and to use push/pull instead.

My $0.02

+ seth