git svn clone of a single directory of SVN repository

Question

I am attempting to use git svn to clone a single directory of a SVN repository into a Git repository.

If I use git svn clone svn+ssh://path/to/repo/trunk/directory, I get a Git repo without branches that mirror the branches in the source SVN repo.

If I use git svn --stdlayout svn+ssh://path/to/repo/trunk/directory, I get an empty Git repo. The following is the output of the command:

Initialized empty Git repository in /directory/.git/
Using higher level of URL: svn+ssh://path/to/repo/trunk/directory => svn+ssh://path/to/repo
W: Ignoring error from SVN, path probably does not exist: (160013): Filesystem has no item: File not found: revision 100, path '/trunk/directory'
W: Do not be alarmed at the above message git-svn is just searching aggressively for old history.
This may take a while on large repositories

I had read that the way to fix the above was to add a revision range like -r 1000:HEAD, this still produces an empty repo. The output is:

Initialized empty Git repository in /directory/.git/
Using higher level of URL: svn+ssh://path/to/repo/trunk/directory => svn+ssh://path/to/repo

Any ideas on how to clone a subdirectory of an SVN repository using git-svn that still grabs all of the branches & tags from the source SVN respository?

Solution 1

You don't want the standard layout, you want something like this:

git svn clone svn+ssh://path/to/repo/ --trunk=trunk/directory --branches=branches/*/directory --tags=tags/*/directory

Solution 2

Prepare and enter the local project directory:

mkdir local/project/path
cd local/project/path

Initialize the local git repository with svn remote and fetch the data:

git svn init http://my_svn_server.com/repository/project/location
git svn fetch

Credit goes to Gabriel Saldaña: http://blog.gabrielsaldana.org/using-git-with-subversion-repository-subdirectory/

Comments

[Stephen Harrison]

The insight here is that you can use wildcard characters in the --branches argument. Good one.

[Nux]

Just a note -- if you don't have branches nor tags for that specific directory then you can safely omit --branches and --tags parameters. That is just using --trunk=... instead of --stdlayout should work fine.

[Nux]

Note that this does not allow adding user (authors) mapping file. At least not with -A.

[MarkHu]

This is practically no different than the one-step git svn clone usually.

[Warpzit]

This did the trick. The other thing that also seems to work is git svn clone --no-metadata...

[Patrick Bergner]

Can I do this with multiple directory values instead of only one? At best with a list of specific directory names. Background: Splitting up a single SVN repository by sub-directories into multiple Git repositories (while only migrating the history for these sub-directories and not the whole SVN repository).

[PaulNUK]

Does that just get you the current contents of the svn project or all the history too ?

[Steve Smith]

Daft question, but what do I do after this? I have an empty folder with a .git folder in it. How do I get at the source I checked out?