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I am in the process of "moving" some very large repo's from svn to git. I know how to do it, but I need to speed up the process.

To save I/O I would like to move the svn repo to a linux box and run the conversion there.

I found this article How to Mirror a Subversion Repository and the recommended command is this one: 

svnadmin hotcopy REPOS_PATH NEW_REPOS_PATH

I will execute the command on the svn server and then copy it to my local disk. Do I need a svn server to access the repository? or can I:

svn git clone my-local-repo to-my-new-git-repo

Any tips on speeding up "git svn clone" are much appreciated

I know there a many, many questions on moving svn to git but this is about moving the svn repo to local disk before the cloning.

Martin Andersen
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2 Answers2

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Subversion provides always a local access by using a file:// URL. This is also the smallest footprint I/O and memory wise as only the svn-client is invoked. Also this is the fastest access to a (svn)repository.

See here for more details

On moving repositories across servers see also this

Community
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Peter Parker
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The best way to speed up git-svn for one-time migrations is not to use it. If you need the whole history, you have to go through the history commit by commit and this simply needs ages. So if you have a local copy of the repository, you will not get any faster without throwing hardware at the process (increasing CPU and maybe RAM).

For a one-time migration git-svn is not the right tool for conversions of repositories or parts 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.

There are plenty 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.

You will be easily able to configure svn2gits rule file to produce the result you want from your current SVN layout, including any complex histories that might exist.

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 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

You see, there are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)

Vampire
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