Comments on: Migrating from svn to git

By: dgront

dgront — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:00:17 +0000

Thanks! This helped a lot to migrate our project. The only extra command I have to use was:
git update-server-info
on the remote server. I don’t know what is does, but it helped.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:23:54 +0000

I love this blog! Thank you so much! This was a life saver.

By: Arthur Nisnevich

Arthur Nisnevich — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:02:04 +0000

Awesome. Thanks for this! After trying several others approaches, this one worked perfectly.

One small note: on OSX 10.5, sed does not have a -r switch. Instead, use the -E switch which accomplishes the same thing. e.g.:

git branch -r | sed -Ene ‘s, *tags/([^@]+)$,\1,p’ | while read tag; do echo “git tag $tag ‘tags/${tag}^’; git branch -r -d tags/$tag”; done | sh

By: JT

JT — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:13:57 +0000

Nate, don’t take your blog down. I refer to this page every time I have to do a migration.

I’ve had to do it a bunch lately as people I work with convert over to git.

I’ve found the best way to convert people is to migrate svn to git, then delete the svn repo and all the backups.

By: Graeme Geldenhuys

Graeme Geldenhuys — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:40:30 +0000

Thanks for the brilliant instructions!! This worked really smooth. The instructions on setting up the tags and branches for git is great. I haven’t seen any body else mention them. You hit the nail on the head with that one.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:00:43 +0000

That solved it. Thanks for the help.

It’s bizarre to me that this requires so many steps. They discontinued the tool git-svnimport, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to replace it for clean one-shot imports.

By: zobie

zobie — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:07:58 +0000

@alexis I had to stare at it for a while but I think that I’ve found the problem. In the regular expression that sed uses the ’1′ needs to be escaped. The backslash must have been stripped out when the post was uploaded. I’ve corrected it above, thanks!

By: Alexis

Alexis — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:55:00 +0000

There is one tag “functional-1.0″ but that’s it. I’m running on Mac OS X. Maybe I’m using a different version of the command line tools than you? FWIW I’m using git 1.6.1, sed 4.1.5, and svn 1.5.1.

By: zobie

zobie — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:06:45 +0000

@alexis – I’m not sure what that means either but I wonder if the problem could be with the ‘^’ in the tag name. Does your subversion tag have special characters in it? I’m not sure how git would handle those, I’ve never tried.

By: Alexis Gallagher

Alexis Gallagher — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:05:13 +0000

When I try the command for importing tags I get the following error:

fatal: Failed to resolve ‘tags/1^’ as a valid ref.
error: remote branch ‘tags/1′ not found.

A mystery to me…