Making Subversion less painful with git-svn

Today I began helping out on an <a href="http://www.intridea.com" target="_blank">Intridea</a> project that (by the client's request) uses Subversion as their revision control system instead of Git.  Initially I was a bit dismayed.  Hell, I actually felt a little sick to my stomach.  Git has treated me very well over the past year, and I hadn't touched a Subversion repo in even longer. Git-svn had crossed my mind, but it wasn't until a coworker suggested it that I decided to give it a try. The first thing was to get it installed.  I followed <a href="http://blog.emmanuelbernard.com/2009/01/how-to-install-git-and-git-svn-on-mac.html" target="_blank">this tutorial</a> and only had to make one small change.  Adding /opt/local/libexex/git-core to my path didn't work.  I did a quick whereis to find out that my git-svn executable is in the /usr/local/git/libexec/git-core/ directory.  I updated my path and everything was kosher. Now to set up the repo.  Most of the tutorials that I found covered setting up a new svn repo with git-svn like <a href="http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html" target="_blank">this one</a>, but in my case, the svn repo had been around for quite some time.  Being the wannabe-know-it-all that I am, I decided to just go ahead an clone the svn repo, like so: <pre class="terminal">git-svn clone http://path-to-the-svn-repo </pre> After about ten minutes of watching the clone chug away, I thought something was up.  Well, it turns out that if you don't include the proper options, the clone will pull down all branches, tags, whatever.  I didn't want, or need all of that.  All I wanted was trunk.  After a brief glance at the git-svn docs, I tried again with the --trunk flag. <pre class="terminal">git-svn clone --trunk http://path-to-the-svn-repo </pre> Aparently, the -s option also works.  It tells git-svn that you svn is in the standard layout with trunk, branches, tags, and whatnot. This time it ran for only five minutes before I asked myself wtf was going on.  I realized that it was pulling down every single revision, which I really didn't need.  I would've stopped it and tried again with the --revision (-r) flag which allows you to specify a revision number, or range of revision number, but the clone was already at rev 900 out of 1100, so  I just let it ride. Once that was done, I was good to go.  I could pretty much just treat it as a regular Git repo until I was ready to push any changes back to the svn repo.  I used <a href="http://www.viget.com/extend/effectively-using-git-with-subversion/" target="_blank">this tutorial</a> by <a href="http://www.viget.com/about/team/cnixon" target="_blank">Clinton Nixon</a>, who I had recently seen do a talk on Scala at the <a href="http://developer-day.com/events/2009-durham.html" target="_blank">Developer Day</a> in Durham, to help guide my general git-svn workflow. 2009-04-21T05:44:57Z How to use Git with an existing Subversion repository via git-svn. 28 git,git-svn,svn,subversion true making-subversion-less-painful-with-git-svn Making Subversion less painful with git-svn

2009-04-28T16:03:24Z