[OT] Anyone w/ svn->git experience and advice?

Russel Winder russel at russel.org.uk
Fri Jan 13 02:29:24 PST 2012


On Fri, 2012-01-13 at 04:53 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> When I asked around the Mercurial scene about doing what I wanted, they 
> basically told me that I was wrong for wanting to preserve the empty 
> directories that the buildsystem for those old revisions was relying on. And 
> they also said that none of the hg/svn tools had any option for inserting 
> directory-preserving dummy files.

Mercurial is a bit like Git in not liking empty directories so I am not
entirely surprised by the reaction.

> But my experience attempting Bazaar was much, *MUCH* worse:
> 
> I was actually completely sold on going with Bazaar at first. But  first of 
> all, *none* of the conversion scripts even *ran*. *At all*. Every single one 
> I tried would just crash right out the gate no matter what arguments I gave 
> them (or even no args, or --help, etc...). And so I tried Bazaar's Python 
> installer, and *that* just kept crashing! Yes, the installer. Someone 
> directed me to try a different version, but the links to it were broken! It 
> was seriously just one thing after another. Practically nothing worked.

This I find surprising, but I don't use Windows.  I think Bazaar is
definitely moving towards the "only Canonical and GNU use it" end
leaving Mercurial and Git as the clear market leaders.  This is sad in a
way since Bazaar is distinctly different from Git and Mercurial and has
some serious USP in some workflows and contexts. 

> And on top of that, I spent hours trying to find the correct place to ask 
> about it all (so if I did manage to ask in the wrong place, it sure as hell 
> wasn't for lack of trying). I got two meaningful repies (and one completely 
> useless one) to *one* of the posts I made, and they ended up not helping at 
> all. My other posts just *sat* there for literally *months* with *zero* 
> responses. Here's the posts:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-windows-installers/+bug/819567
> https://answers.launchpad.net/svn2bzr/+question/165994
> https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr-fastimport/+question/166680

Zero responses to the latter two is clearly not good.  I think though it
is an indication that fewer people are using Bazaar and Launchpad unless
they are Canonical folk working on Ubuntu.

The Bazaar team have responded to the bug report though.

The real place to ask questions is on the mailing list
bazaar at lists.ubuntu.com.  This used to be a fairly frantic place, but is
now fairly quiet.  Another reflection that Bazaar is less and less at
the forefront of DVCS.

> (The reason I was looking into hg-fast-export was so I could convert one of 
> my less important Hg repos to Bzr so I could try out Bzr on one of my 
> existing projects.)

I am not sure the Bazaar<->Mercurial bridge has been properly completed.
If you need it ask Jelmer directly, and he will surely know.

[...]
> Maybe, but the main reasons I'm going with git are the difficulties above, 
> and the fact that I like TortoiseGit much better than TortoiseHg (And 
> because bitbucket now supports Git. If GitHub were my only Git option, I'd 
> use Hg instead.)

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[...]
> >If so I would just give up
> >and live with the fact that Git doesn't understand directories only
> >files.
> 
> I'm too damn stubborn ;)

Mostly so am I, sometimes it's best just to let it go.

[...]
> Yea, like I said, I was almost totally sold on Bazaar at one point, but the 
> complete lack of support, and the lack of half of it even working at all, 
> ended up being dealbreakers.

Your experience and mine are very different, I always found the Bazaar
support top notch.  Bazaar is still though very much third in the DVCS
arena and so increasingly not relevant.

[...]
> Yea, in fact I've already gone ahead and done that (together with 
> svndumpsanitizer: http://miria.linuxmaniac.net/svndumpsanitizer/ ) to remove 
> the executable files.
> 
> Maybe I should try removing the downloads dir too...But now I'm just taking 
> random shots in the dark :/

Almost certainly best to do all the history editing in Subversion before
doing the conversions.

[...]
> Hmm...Maybe I could somehow add the .gitignore files to the SVN history 
> before git even touches it?

Or some other name such
as .dummyfiletokeepgithappywithemptydirectories :-)

[...]
> Yea, it is the usual structure (aside from the additional top-level 
> downloads directory). And I included "--trunk=trunk --tags=tags" (there are 
> no branches, other than the SVN "tags"). I also tried "-s". No dice. :/

Hummm... to date I have never had git-svn fail on a standard Subversion
structure repository unless there were faults in the Subversion history.

> As a side note, Git keeps feeling more and more appropriately-named... ;)

On the up side Git has remote tracking branches which are really
splendid.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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