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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T17:18:38+00:00

I have an interesting source control workflow problem. My company is working with a

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I have an interesting source control workflow problem.

My company is working with a third party contractor that is using SVN to track a product that is currently in active development. We will be taking over this repository within the next few months, but we would like to start work on other functionality within the project. For obvious reasons, our contractor has denied us commit access, but agreed to read access to their SVN repo.

For our windows development machines, we use a mercurial repository. I would like to somehow copy the SVN repo to a new HG repo and periodically merge changes committed to SVN into HG. In other words, we will be working side-by-side in two different repositories.

Has anyone done anything like this? Any suggestions on an approach?

Thanks.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I imagine any process would only get worst as your changes in mercurial increase and get further apart from the changes in SVN that are never merging with your mercurial changes. However, I would be curious to see how mercurial merges fair with that complexity. I would approach it this way:

    1) Export from svn to create your hg repo, lets call this /SvnExportCleanHG
    Clone that to a working copy where all new features from your company will go: /WorkingHG

    2) When you want to pull in new changes from SVN, do a svn update from /SvnExportCleanHG and commit this to the clean repo. This will have 2 revisions now, original and latest from svn. From within /WorkingHG run an hg pull /SvnExportCleanHG and merge all the inevitable changes. Then commit that to the WorkingHG repo.

    Now you have tried to use mercurials merging to the best of your ability and you still have a clean /SvnExportCleanHG that you can pull the next change from SVN without any conflicts.

    Anytime you want to update from svn again, do step 2. Updating from svn and committing in the clean repo will never conflict because it will only reflect svn, but it will always allow you to pull and merge from your working copy HG because they are based the same.

    It depends on the level of your changes and the changes from SVN if mercurial merging will buy you much. If you guys stay in different baselines of the code, this will be a great workflow and save a lot of manual effort. If you are overlapping heavily, this will still work, but it will simply facilitate your workflow as opposed to solve many merging issues.

    I would be really interested in how this works out if you ever try it.

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