Converting a local svn repo dump to git

Question

I searched related questions but I couldn't find anything matching my specific situation: I have some old repository archives from an SVN server that was taken down years ago. They're tarballs of the original repository structure on the server. What I want to do is convert them to git repositories as a basis for future work/reviving the projects. I've already read several tutorials about the conversion process, and I think I can figure out the authors conversion, branches mapping, etc., but they all assume you have an SVN server and a url for the repository. Do I need to install and setup and SVN server to do this conversion, or is there some way I can point either git clone or svn2git (or another tool) at the repo dump I have?

Solution 1

install subversion locally in order to import your dump, then with git-svn package.

You can use git svn clone file:///path/to/svn/repo /path/to/empty/dir

Solution 2

Retrieve a list of all Subversion committers:

svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors-transform.txt

Clone the Subversion repository using git-svn:

git svn clone [SVN repo URL] --no-metadata -A authors-transform.txt --stdlayout ~/temp

Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore:

cd ~/temp
git svn show-ignore > .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m 'Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore.'

Push repository to a bare git repository:

git init --bare ~/new-bare.git
cd ~/new-bare.git
git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/trunk

Then push the temp repository to the new bare repository.

cd ~/temp
git remote add bare ~/new-bare.git
git config remote.bare.push 'refs/remotes/*:refs/heads/*'
git push bare

Rename “trunk” branch to “master”:

cd ~/new-bare.git
git branch -m trunk master

Clean up branches and tags:

cd ~/new-bare.git
git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/tags |
cut -d / -f 4 |
while read ref
do
  git tag "$ref" "refs/heads/tags/$ref";
  git branch -D "tags/$ref";
done

Reference: http://john.albin.net/git/convert-subversion-to-git

Solution 3

1. All (?) svn -> git converters require live Subversion repository,
2. Tree-copy of repository is not a dump, it's usual file-level backup.

You have:

1. Install and configure any Subversion server (if your converter can't handle file:/// protocol for SVN, otherwise it's not needed - just unpack tarball(s) and check repo with svn client)
2. Read about git-svn
3. Use git-svn

Comments

[Dialecticus]

Standard edition of VisualSVN Server is free, so there's plan B.

[R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE]

I think installing the original SVN server would be a good bit easier than that..

[R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE]

I already found this experimenting last night and got it working, but this is the correct answer. Thanks and +1/accepted! And welcome to SO. :-)

[John Zabroski]

Can you elaborate what git svn clone "back" does? I'm not understanding how svnadmin dump and this command relate to one another? Are you just taking a backup of the svn repository prior to using git svn clone, in case you screw something up?

[Richard Chambers]

Also see How to git-svn clone the last n revisions from a Subversion repository? which describes how to selectively clone svn to git.