Best practices for maintaining a subversion mirror?

Oliver Charles· Nov 24, 2008, 10:55 UTC · lore

Hi,

I just got myself a new server, and as I'm the major Git-using person at my work, I'd like to set a mirror of our Subversion repository up to hopefully convert a few more people. At the moment, I've done git svn clone http://svn..., and then git clone --bare to make a --bare version of this clone.

Now that I have this mirror, I have this entry in my crontab to update it hourly:

0 * * * * cd /.git && /usr/bin/git --git-dir=. svn fetch && /usr/bin/git update-ref refs/heads/master refs/remotes/git-svn

This seems to be working nicely as a readonly interface, but when I clone this repository (git clone git://foo/repo.git) - served via git-daemon - I can't seem to get svn rebase to work on it, which means I can't dcommit my changes back to Subversion.

Am I doing things generally the right way, or am I doing it completely wrong? :-) Any tips appreciated!

- Oliver Charles

Peter Harris· Nov 24, 2008, 15:37 UTC · re: Oliver Charles · lore

Re: Best practices for maintaining a subversion mirror?

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 5:55 AM, Oliver Charles wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> This seems to be working nicely as a readonly interface, but when I
> clone this repository (git clone git://foo/repo.git) - served via
> git-daemon - I can't seem to get svn rebase to work on it, which means
> I can't dcommit my changes back to Subversion.
>
> Am I doing things generally the right way, or am I doing it completely
> wrong? :-) Any tips appreciated!

First, make sure you aren't using the --no-metadata flag. git svn rebase needs that metadata to rebuild its index.

Second, a simple "git clone" will not set up the svn remotes; you have to do that by hand. This is what I do when I clone my svn mirror:

mkdir project cd project git init git remote add origin git://mirror/project git config --add remote.origin.fetch +refs/remotes/*:refs/remotes/* git fetch git svn init -Ttrunk svn://upstream/project git config --add svn-remote.svn.fetch branches/foo:refs/remotes/foo git config --add svn-remote.svn.fetch branches/bar:refs/remotes/bar git reset --hard trunk git svn rebase

Once you have it nailed down, you can put it into a script so all your co-workers don't have to do that by hand too.

(Also, I quickly reset my cron job to run every five minutes; I found an hour was way too long for my taste. YMMV, of course)

Peter Harris