git tag: fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/my_tag_name' as a valid ref

Question

I'm currently cloning a svn repo that has standard layout. It currently contains the code corresponding one iOS app and one Android app. Tags indicates when we froze the code and released it.

I cloned the repo using (the SVN server runs locally on the machine) :

git svn clone --trunk=/trunk --tags=/tags --branches=/branches --authors-file=authors.txt http://localhost/svn/MY_PROJECT MY_PROJECT

Then in MY_PROJECT,

git remote add origin ssh://git@my_bitbuket_repo.com:7999/test/MY_PROJECT.git
git push -u origin master

And now, the problematic part. Now I wan't to push the tags.

mylogin@MY_MACHINE MINGW64 ~/workspace/svn2git/MY_PROJECT (master)
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/tags/android_v1.4.2
  remotes/tags/android_v1.5
  remotes/tags/iOS-1.4.1
  remotes/tags/iOS-1.5
  remotes/tags/iOS_Android_1.3
  remotes/tags/ios_v1.6
  remotes/trunk

So I run the script given on this useful page, and here is what I get :

mylogin@MY_MACHINE MINGW64 ~/workspace/svn2git/MY_PROJECT (master)
$ sh convert_remotes_to_tags.sh
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/android_v1.4.2' as a valid ref.
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/android_v1.5' as a valid ref.
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/iOS-1.4.1' as a valid ref.
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/iOS-1.5' as a valid ref.
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/iOS_Android_1.3' as a valid ref.

So I tested what is given on this particular answer :

mylogin@MY_MACHINE MINGW64 ~/workspace/svn2git/MY_PROJECT (master)
$ cd .git/svn/refs/remotes/tags/android_v1.4.2/

mylogin@MY_MACHINE MINGW64 ~/workspace/svn2git/MY_PROJECT/.git/svn/refs/remotes/tags/android_v1.4.2 (GIT_DIR!)
$ git config --bool core.bare true

and

mylogin@MY_MACHINE MINGW64 ~/workspace/svn2git/MY_PROJECT (master)
$ cd .git/svn/refs/remotes/tags/

mylogin@MY_MACHINE MINGW64 ~/workspace/svn2git/MY_PROJECT/.git/svn/refs/remotes/tags (BARE:master)
$ git config --bool core.bare true

But this won't work either (running the same convert-tags-script)...

I tested another script to migrate the tags, here it is :

for tag in `git branch -r --sort=committerdate | grep "tags/" | sed 's/.*tags\///'`; do
  git fetch --tags # must fetch tags before pushing more
  git tag -a -m "Convert Subversion tag" $tag refs/remotes/origin/tags/$tag
  git push origin $tag
done

But this won't work as well, having such logs :

fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/origin/tags/android_v1.4.1' as a valid ref.
error: src refspec android_v1.4.1 does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://git@my_bitbuket_repo.com:7999/df/my_project.git'
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/origin/tags/iOS-1.4' as a valid ref.
error: src refspec iOS-1.4 does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://git@my_bitbuket_repo.com:7999/df/my_project.git'
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/origin/tags/android_v1.4.2' as a valid ref.
error: src refspec android_v1.4.2 does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://git@my_bitbuket_repo.com:7999/df/my_project.git'
fatal: Failed to resolve 'refs/remotes/origin/tags/iOS-1.4.1' as a valid ref.
error: src refspec iOS-1.4.1 does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://git@my_bitbuket_repo.com:7999/df/my_project.git'

Do you have any clue about how to migrate those tags ?

Answer 1

git-svn is not the right tool for one-time conversions of repositories. It is a great tool if you want to use Git as frontend for an existing SVN server, but for one-time conversions you should not use git-svn, but svn2git which is much more suited for this use-case and also makes proper Git tags from the SVN tags.

There are pleny tools called svn2git, the probably best one is the KDE one from https://github.com/svn-all-fast-export/svn2git. I strongly recommend using that svn2git tool. It is the best I know available out there and it is very flexible in what you can do with its rules files.

If you are not 100% about the history of your repository, svneverever from http://blog.hartwork.org/?p=763 is a great tool to investigate the history of an SVN repository when migrating it to Git.

---

Even though git-svn (or the wrong svn2git in your case) is easier to start with, here are some further reasons why using the KDE svn2git instead of git-svn is superior, besides its flexibility:

• the history is rebuilt much better and cleaner by svn2git (if the correct one is used), this is especially the case for more complex histories with branches and merges and so on
• the tags are real tags and not branches in Git
• with git-svn the tags contain an extra empty commit which also makes them not part of the branches, so a normal fetch will not get them until you give --tags to the command as by default only tags pointing to fetched branches are fetched also. With the proper svn2git tags are where they belong
• if you changed layout in SVN you can easily configure this with svn2git, with git-svn you will loose history eventually
• with svn2git you can also split one SVN repository into multiple Git repositories easily
• or combine multiple SVN repositories in the same SVN root into one Git repository easily
• the conversion is a gazillion times faster with the correct svn2git than with git-svn

There are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)