Git local master synchronized with remote master

Question

Currently we have a master SVN repository at a remote location. It takes a while to commit and update changes.

Would it be possible to setup a local Git repository and a remote Git repository such that commits made to one of the repositories are automatically synchronized with the other? This would mean committing/updating would not take as long due to the server being local, but we would still be getting changes from the remote location and vice versa.

Has anyone set this up and would there be problems where commits are made to both repositories at the same time and the two fail to synchronize?

Note: This is similar to Does GIT support master/slave concept like SVN?, but for that question only one of the repositories would receive commits.

Thanks

Answer 1

First of all, Apache Subversion supports write-through proxying that should help you to deploy a local read only replica of the SVN repository. Such repository replica should help you improve performance of all read Subversion operations (e.g. svn checkout, svn update, svn log etc). Write operations (svn commit, svn import etc) will still go to the remote repository. But unfortunately, write-through proxy solutuion can be difficult to setup, a burden to maintain and has some downsides.

In the second place, if your Subversion server is VisualSVN Server then you can use its Multisite Repository Replication (VDFS) feature that is free of all write-through proxy problems and is generally more than 10x times faster. VDFS was developed to solve the WAN bottleneck for distributed teams using Subversion so I guess that it should help in your particular case.

When choosing between a write-through proxy solution and VDFS we at VisualSVN Team are definitely sure that VDFS is the ultimate winner. There are numerous points where VDFS wins actually. First and foremost benefit of VDFS is the fact that Subversion users will notice huge performance improvements when accessing Subversion repositories but they will not even notice that there is any special system deployed. VDFS is 100% transparent (invisible I'd say) for users.

Compared with write-through proxy, VDFS

• can be setup in a couple of minutes,

• is ready to be used as a disaster recovery solution,

• replicates user access permissions,

• replicates modified revision properties,

• ensures determined and stable execution of hook scripts,

• fully supports locking (i.e. it does support svn lock, svn unlock required for lock-modify-unlock versioning model),

• supports advanced authentication mechanisms such as Integrated Windows Authentication (i.e. Active Directory Single Sign-On).

I'd like to note that Multisite Repository Replication feature is not available in VisualSVN Server Standard Edition (free). The feature requires Enterprise Edition license (paid) to be installed on all server instances using the feature.