Exit Sourceforge SVN to Git

Why Would I Leave the Loving Arms of SourceForge?

Please, I am not looking to wreck any kind of relationship that has been established over the years or months. I just find that there are many projects hosted in SourceForge as SVN that would be well served if there was a git repo as well. Many times, I'll take the SVN repo, convert it and push it to Github, nothing against SourceForge, I just like Github better. SourceForge supports multiple version control systems including git. I've not done any cross SVN-GIT development, so I'm not sure how much of a burden it would be to support both. It would seem that git is the way of future, and with that in mind, let's git going.

That is so lame, I'm sorry.

Make a Backup Repo Copy

This is the secret in the sauce. We rsync the bare SVN repo onto our local machine and life is good. Instructions are lifted from here.

rsync -av PROJECTNAME.svn.sourceforge.net::svn/PROJECTNAME/* .

Adrian Smith also writes about this feature of SourceForge which makes backups and conversions a snap!

Install svn2git

svn2git does what its name implies, but in a very robust amazing way. For those of you who have yet to install rvm I would recommend checking out one of my previous posts. Then, installation is a total breeze. If you install it to your HOME directory, installation should be as easy as:

gem install svn2git

If you've been crusty, or on a server, and you've installed rvm and friends to /usr/local you'll of course need a sudo in front of the gem command.

Convert the Local Bare Repo Copy to Git!

First, you'll need an empty git repo.

mkdir mySourceForgeProject
cd mySourceForgeProject
git init .

When invoked, svn2git will blast everything into the current working directory. By creating the above repo first, we avoid having to sift through our working directory later.

There are many svn2git command examples out there. Some can be pretty confusing for the SVN novice. Adrian Smith lays it out like:

svn2git file:///home/adrian/upm.sourceforge/ --trunk swing/trunk --branches swing/branches --tags swing/tags --authors ../upm-authors

One confusing part might be, "How do I know that the trunk is swing/trunk?" A valid concern, but also one that is specific to the SVN repository. You can cheat and add --rootistrunk to just get a copy in Git. You may also want to check out this gist as it's pretty comprehensive.

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