Question

I’m trying to modify my bash prompt to print out if I’m in a git-svn repo. I see that git svn repos have a .git/svn folder, so I could check with:

# Find the top level git folder
_git_dir=`git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2> /dev/null`
# Find svn folder
_gsvn_check=`cd $_git_dir; ls .git/svn 2> /dev/null`

But then I noticed that my normal git repo has a .git/svn folder. Is there any way to know for sure that you’re in git-svn?

Answer 1

The .git/svn directory can be created if you run any git svn command in any repository – e.g. just running git svn info, as Carl Norum suggests will create it. However, a slightly better test might be that .git/svn exists and is non-empty, e.g.

[ -d .git/svn  ] && [ x != x"$(ls -A .git/svn/)" ] && echo Looks like git-svn

If you want a stricter test, you could look through the history of HEAD for any commit messages that contain a git-svn-id – essentially that’s what git svn info is doing before it gives up. For example:

[ x != x"$(git log -n 1 --grep='^\s*git-svn-id' --oneline)" ] && echo "git-svn!"

… but it sounds as if that might be too slow for your use case.

The source code in git-svn.perl describes the layout of a git-svn repository in its different versions:

• https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/git-svn.perl#L6433

… so you could write tests for all of those if you want to be careful to catch all the different versions.