Space Babies » git

Using git to follow Subversion branches

joost — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:39:02 +0000

Reluctantly, I’ve had to migrate some projects back to Subversion. Thankfully git-svn is great. It even follows Subversion branches as local git branches, making merging painless. Here’s how you create a git branch from an svn branch:

git checkout -b localbranchname remotebranchname

Obviously it assumes you’ve initialised the git repo correctly and you’re using all the defaults. Something like this:

git svn init -s http://path.to/repo projectname

cd projectname

git svn fetch

Update: merging a Subversion branch with Subversion trunk (aka Git master) is a pain. A real merge is not possible; but a squashed commit works. This is what I prefer since we try to keep Svn branches pretty small and the history is retained in Subversion anyway.

git checkout remotes/trunk -b big-merge

git merge –squash svn-branch

git commit

When that’s done I can safely merge the two Git branches:

git checkout master

git merge big-merge

git svn dcommit

Migrating subversion to git

joost — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:38:02 +0000

I thought I had written this down somewhere, but apparently I didn’t. Here is the perfect guide for transferring a svn repo to a git repo.

And just in case that blog ever goes down, here is the text:

The first thing we need to do is create a users file that maps all your SVN users to your GIT users. Just make a file on your Desktop named ‘users.txt’. Map the users using this format:

jmaddox = Jon Maddox bigpappa = Brian Biggs

Simple. Now here are the commands you’ll run. I’ll explain them below.

mkdir my_blog_tmp cd my_blog_tmp git-svn init http://code.yoursite.net/my_blog/trunk/ --no-metadata git config svn.authorsfile ~/Desktop/users.txt git-svn fetch

The first two are self explanatory, we’re making a new directory for the temporary repository. The second command initializes the directory as a git-svn hybrid thing and points the origin at your SVN repository. The flag, –no-metadata, tells GIT to leave all the SVN details behind (not the commit log). The fourth command tells GIT to remap all the SVN users to GIT users when it sucks down the source and history. The last command actually does the fetching.

Ok, so now after a few LONG minutes, your source is all there. Do a git log to see that your users have been mapped. Sweet!

Now you just have one last step. You need to clone this repository. Why do we do this? When doing a normal git clone it will take everything we want from the temporary repository, while leaving behind all the SVN cruft that was there to support the git-svn stuff.

git clone my_blog_tmp my_blog

I heart git

joost — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:56:33 +0000

You only appreciate fast version control when you’re on a slow link. Thank you Linus for creating git, I would have gone insane without it today!

PS – posts about RailsWayCon2010 presentations coming up!

Start a new git remote branch

joost — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:43:07 +0000

Since I am tired of Googling it, I am going to post the commands required to start a new local branch in git, then push that to the origin, then pull it in to continue working on it. If you don’t know what I am talking about, that’s fine. I do.

$ git checkout -b zzz
# Let the hacking commence...
$ git push origin zzz
$ git checkout master # see note 2
$ git branch -f zzz origin/zzz
$ git checkout zzz
# Let the hacking continue...