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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T22:24:07+00:00

We have moved most of our codebase from a monolithic svn repository into a

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We have moved most of our codebase from a monolithic svn repository into a set of git repositories. For various reasons, some work (on old versions of the project deployed in the field) has to continue in old svn branches, after they have been moved to git and deleted from the subversion trunk.

I have just done some work like this on an svn branch and re-applied the changes from the svn repository into the git repositories by doing the following:

cd <common_svn_commit_root>
svn diff -r 12344:12345 > ~/r12345.diff
gedit ~/r12345.diff
cd <common_git_commit_root>
git apply ~/r12345.diff

but it is rather cumbersome to do this for each and every svn commit, especially the gedit step, where I have to manually munge the svn paths into git paths (usually by prefixing the top level directory name).

One problem with trying some of the options presented so far is that the structure of the old svn repo and the new git repo are different. This is one of the reasons I have to edit the patch file.

The old directory structure was

svn
    configurations
        blah
        mine
        blam
    plugins
        foo
        core
        mine
        bar

Whereas the new structure is

svn
    plugins
        bar
git
    my_git
        my_config
        plugins
            mine
    core_git
        plugins
            core
    foo_git
        plugins
            foo

I would really like to know if there is an easier way to do this, and understand what the best practice is for this situation.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Assuming that the directory structure of your sources kept the same, I suggest that you add a remote to your old SVN branch :

    $ git config --add svn-remote.svn-branch.url http://my.svn.server/project/branches/my-branch
$ git config --add svn-remote.svn-branch.fetch :refs/remotes/old-svn-branch

    This way, you will be able to track changes on both old SVN branches, and your brand new Git server in local branches, and use git-cherry-pick to apply the commits containing the fixes on your Git server branches.

    EDIT

    Git keeps track of the file moves.

    I did not try it myself, but if you clone the SVN repo, then locally move the directories to match you new Git server structure, cherry-pick merges could apply it on the moved files.

    It already worked for me for some files, but maybe there’s some limitations. It definitely is worth the try.

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