Question

Why do I get this error message?

Answer 1

(Posted Chad’s "question" as an answer, fixed formatting and typos.)

There are a couple of causes for this error message.

The first, being the most common. You have two disjoint histories in your git repository: The history that you made in git, and the history from the remote svn repository.

To fix this, you need to make your git repository and svn repository share one common ancestor so git can figure what commits have changed what.

The following Article, discusses how to fix the problem:

The second possible cause of the problem is if you have an early version of git (possible, windows msysGit package) and you have just created a new git repository that communicates with a remote svn repository.

For example:

git svn init svn://svn.xxx.xxx/xxx/trunk
git svn fetch -r BASE:10

or

git clone svn://svn.xxx.xxx/xxx/trunk // Adds all the files in the revision...

And you get the follow error messages, when using the following commands.

$ git svn info
Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree

$ git svn rebase
Unable determine upstream SVN information working tree history

$ git svn dcommit
Unable to determine upstream SVN information from HEAD history

If you get the above error messages, first step is to check your git version. If your running a older git version <= 1.6.3.3.* that was in my case with (msysGit), then the easiest way to fix the problem is to update to a newest version of git such as 1.6.4.*.

The following Article discusses the problem in more detail.