Git - rewriting history and treating folders as branches

Question

I have a Git repository representing a source repository pulled in from git-tfs.

TFS has the convention of storing branches as full copies in folders. I'd like to run through the history of the git copy from TFS, treating commits against specific folders instead as commits against specific branches.

For instance, the repository looks something like

Main (TFS concept of trunk / master / default)
Branch1
Branch2
Branch3
Folder/Branch4

To make this a little more complicated, some of these branches were renamed at some point in time.

So Branch1 could have at one point been B1.

I'll have to accommodate this scenario as well.

And of course, there were merges from one branch to another.

I'm not sure if this can even be done, but I'm interested to see if anyone has any suggestions. I've looked at git-filter-branch, but I'm not sure the end result would be what I'm looking for exactly. So while I could keep experimenting until I get something kinda-sorta right, I figured I'd ask if anyone has done this before ;0

We are currently discussing this with the author of git-tfs [here](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/git-tf/zm0bekrZ2C8). Feel free to join as. — Bruno Berisso, Jul 02 '12 at 03:14

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:47

I haven't done it before, but such a transformation might involve:

git log --name-ony aBranchName: to do for each branch, in order to get all unique name those branches got during the course of the full history of the repo
extract each branch history (based on their name) into a separate Git repo (through git filter-branch, as shown in this SO question)
fetch all those Git repo into one (you get multiple roots)
assemble those branch histories through grafts points and filter-branch: see "Convert multiple hg repositories to single git repository with multiple branches" for the general idea.

Git - rewriting history and treating folders as branches

1 Answers1