Question

After Google-ing the whole day, I will have to ask experts to help me.

I cloned some public SVN repo that I converted to git. This repo has just one master branch, and it starts from some specific version, say 1.0.

I also have a git repo that was created independently, and that starts with the same 1.0 version. I created this because I wanted to hack some public project. I just downloaded the source code, created empty git repo, added version 1.0 and proceeded to hack on it. This repo also has just master branch.

Now, I would lie to create a third git repo, where version 1.0 would be the starting point, and it would have two branches: ‘svn’ and ‘mystuff’. I would like to keep history of both branches.

       1.0
      /   \
     /     \
br. svn    br. mystuff
     |       |
   v1.1      v1.1'
   v1.2      v1.2'
   v1.3      v1.3'
    .          .
    .          .

If I had this I could easily get new revisions from SVN repo using svn2git, and easily merge them with my local “mystuff” branch. I don’t need to push to SVN repo, just fetch new revisions from it.

Can you help me make using git fun again?

Answer 1

The kind-of-hacky way is using git format-patch to export all the commits of a repo to a directory, git checkout the other’s repo 1.0 branch, create a new branch (git checkout -b new-branch), and then git am your previously generated patches.

So, let’s call public your clone of the public SVN repo, and local the git repo you made by downloading the source and hacked onto.

cd local
mkdir ../patches

# -o tells the output directory for the patches
# the git log ... gives you the hash of the second commit of the repo (the first one
# changes are already present in your 'public' repo
git format-patch -o ../patches/ $(git log --pretty=format:%H | head -n-1 | tail -1)

cd ../public
git checkout -b mystuff 1.0
# Apply patches
git am ../patches/*