Question

I’m trying to move our existing svn repository to git. We don’t need to do any syncing between the two (so no git svn fetches or dcommits) — we’re just moving over and that’s it.

I issued this command to create the git repository:

git svn clone -s https://server/repos/my_repo

This ran fine. However, when I cd‘d into the new my_repo directory, the files that were in there were part of one of the branches (not the trunk).

Doing a git branches -a yields:

* master
  modelExperimentalTrunk
  modelExperimentalTrunk@719
  dRefactoring
  reorganise
  stableV396
  tags/v1.0
  trunk

I am on the master branch, but the files that are in my sandbox are actually from the dRefactoring branch (one of our more obscure branches).

Questions:

• Why was the master branch not connected to trunk?
• Is there a way to reconnect it to trunk? Or can that be done during the git svn clone stage?
• Also, given that this is going to be on a server, is there any way git svn can create a –bare repository?

Answer 1

Reconnecting the master branch to trunk is easy, just run:

git checkout master
git reset --hard trunk

This switches to master branch (if this is not already the case) and resets it and the working tree to state of the trunk branch. After this you can safely delete the trunk branch.

git-svn doesn’t support bare repositories out of the box. Read http://gsocblog.jsharpe.net/archives/12 for more details. But I don’t think that you need this complicated solution as you just want to do a single import of your SVN repository.

Therefore you can just create a bare clone of your already existing git repository and you’re set.