How do I keep an svn:external up to date using git-svn?

Question

Treating my repository as a SVN repo, I get:

svn co http://myrepo/foo/trunk foo
...
foo/
  bar/
  baz/ -> http://myrepo/baz/trunk

Treating it as a Git repo, I get:

git svn clone http://myrepo/foo --trunk=trunk --branches=branches --tags=tags
...
foo/
  bar/

I can clone baz to my local machine elsewhere and add a symlink, but that's just a hack. Is there a way to have git svn rebase automatically pull in those changes when it updates everything else, just like svn up does?

Solution 1

The solution I ended up using was just to symlink to other git-svn clones on my local box. This worked pretty well: it allows me to commit changes back, and it allows me to make local changes on project A just to get them into project B.

Solution 2

The best means of integrating svn externals with git-svn that I've seen is this script, which clones your externals into a .git_externals/ directory and creates the symlinks and exclude files you need. I find this a simple and direct solution. YMMV.

Here is an older overview of other options for dealing with svn externals with git-svn. To me they look a little over-complicated and liable to break under subsequent Git use.

Solution 3

I just wrote a short script which checkouts all svn:externals of the current HEAD to the root directory and excludes them from the git repository.

Place it to .git/hooks/post-checkout and it will keep those external checkouts up to date whenever the working tree changes, for example due to git svn rebase or git-checkout.

#!/bin/bash
set -eu

revision=$(git svn info | sed -n 's/^Revision: \([1-9][0-9]*\)$/\1/p')
git svn -r${revision} propget svn:externals | head -n-1 | {
    while read checkout_args
    do
        checkout_dirname=$(echo ${checkout_args} | cut -d' ' -f3)
        svn checkout ${checkout_args}
        if [ -z $(grep ${checkout_dirname} .git/info/exclude) ]
        then
            echo ${checkout_dirname} >> .git/info/exclude
        fi
    done
}

Solution 4

I also made a script (both Perl and Ruby variants available) that does this for me, it's at http://github.com/liyanage/git-tools/.

• Recursively checks out all svn:externals
• Can be run repeatedly in case the clone of a large repository aborts halfway through. Happened to me a lot. It picks up where it left off.
• Adds all svn:externals entries it finds and processes to .git/info/exclude
• Adds all svn:ignore entries it encounters to .git/info/exclude
• Can be run regularly after the first run to do the svn:rebase in all cloned sub-sandboxes, discover new externals and new svn:ignores

Update: I am no longer maintaining this script. Its functionality for recursively cloning and updating an SVN repository, as well as other git-related features, is available in this newer project that I am actively maintaining: http://liyanage.github.com/git-tools/

Solution 5

Just for the record: I followed this suggestion and tried using SmartGit for dealing with svn:externals.

SmartGit is by far the best GUI client I've ever seen for Git. Regarding svn:externals, it not only correctly fetches them, but also presents the option of doing a "fast snapshot" (read-only, HEAD-only clone) of external repositories.

Unfortunately it is not free for commercial use (and I found the license price a little bit too high - yes I'm a cheapskate). It may be used for free for non-commercial purposes though.

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Comments

[Marc Liyanage]

I'd like to learn what didn't work for you so I can improve the script. Can you contact me?

[Paŭlo Ebermann]

This seems not to work for me (here the externals are relative links to the same repository).

[axk]

There's a lot of forks. Does anyone know which one of them works on windows with msysgit? The linked version just hangs.

[Bibek Shrestha]

Which folder would you run this against? If my main svn repository is /path/to/repo and the externals are defined inside /path/to/repo/myexternals/folder/ then should I run the script inside /path/to/repo or myexternals/folder?

[pms1969]

+1 for something that almost works on windows git. I had to tweak it a little bit, but it's the best solution on here for windows.

[Carl]

@pms1969: Source for the tweaked version?

[Plouff]

Couldn't make it work either. The documentation seems out of sync. gh clone-externals is not recognized as a valid subcommand.