Today while working with a 3rd party’s codebase, I ran into a situation which git-svn could not directly handle without pulling in massive amounts of unnecessary repository history. Turns out the solution was much simpler than I anticipated, so I’m sharing here in case it’s useful for somebody else. The repository was as follows:
http://svn.domain.org/svn/trunk/<project_name> -- Production branch http://svn.domain.org/svn/branches/<project_name> -- Development branch
I tried a number of approaches. First off, using the normal –stdlayout option with http://svn.domain.org/svn repository root to git-svn clone would have pulled in thousands of changesets from the repository which had nothing to do with the project I was working on.
Next I tried to use –trunk=trunk/<project_name> and –branches=branches/<project_name> and unfortunately this method tried to create a new branch for every child directory of branches/<project_name>. Obviously this wasn’t what I wanted either.
After doing a bit of searching on the web, I stumbled across another solution via this blog. Basically what it suggests doing is to use a separate svn-remote for the alternative path. This conveniently works around the issue quite nicely without any side-effects I’ve run into so far. Here’s the steps I followed:
- git svn clone http://svn.domain.org/svn/ –trunk=trunk/<project_name> <project_name>
- cd <project_name>
- vim .git/config
- Add an additional remote as follows:
[svn-remote "svndev"]
url = http://svn.domain.org/svn/
fetch = branches/<project_name>:refs/remotes/dev - git svn fetch svndev
- git checkout -b dev remotes/dev
After following those steps, you now have a new remote ‘remotes/dev’ which is a copy of the dev environment branch from the repository and a new local branch called “dev”. You should now be able to proceed like normal using your usual git-svn workflow.
Of course the obvious answer would be to use standard repository layouts or to not use Subversion and/or git-svn, but sometimes that’s not always an option. I hope this helps someone stuck in a similar situation. Also, please be sure and sound off in the comments if you find an alternative solution!
Update:
Here are a couple additional links which might prove useful depending on your desired workflow.
Tags: branches, git, git-svn, layout, repository, stdlayout, subversion, svn
