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?
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.
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.
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
}
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/.
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/
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.
I decided to write a "simple" perl script to handle all this stuff for me. I've put it recently to github, try it out, maybe it would help: http://github.com/sushdm/git_svn_externals/.
It essentially does git-svn clone for all externals found, and it looks for them recursively, clones, symlinks them in proper places and excludes all .git_externals dirs and symlinks so that you can still use 'git svn dcommit'.
Good luck.
Here's what I've done.
First I created an empty SVN repo (for the same root as the git):
svn checkout --depth empty http://path/to/repo .
This created empty svn repo in the git root. The point is that is contains the SVN externals properties.
Next I simply check only the externals (I placed in PATH cygwin tools):
svn propget svn:externals | sed -e 's/ / .\//' | sed -e 's/\'//g' | xargs -L1 svn co
try this python script https://bitbucket.org/nytmyn/gitsvnext/overview
to checkout svn externals run following in your git repository
python /../gitsvnext/run update
run this to know what to put to .git/info/exclude
python /../gitsvnext/run list
