Convert SVN-Repo directly to git or hg (no dump-files needed)

Origo, where I'm hosting my open-source software up to now, is closing end of this month. So I need to move these projects somewhere else. I take the chance for migrating the subversion repositories to git. Here is how.

Hartmut Goebel

2012-05-25

If you are going to convert your repo to git or mercurial, you can use
Eric S. Raymonds excellent
`reposurgeon` tool.
The current development version can read directly form subversion
repositories. It's recommended to create a local mirror first. A tool
called `svnpull` for pulling the SVN repo into a local mirror is
provided.
Homepage: http://www.catb.org/esr/reposurgeon/
Development version: https://gitorious.org/reposurgeon/reposurgeon

Here is an example of a simple conversion of a simple repository:

PROJECT=ssl-audit
svnrepo=https://svn.origo.ethz.ch/$PROJECT
gitrepo=/tmp/$PROJECT-git

cd /tmp
repopuller $svnrepo

reposurgeon <<EOF
read /tmp/$PROJECT-mirror
prefer git
edit
references lift
rebuild $gitrepo
EOF

Recommended Cleanup Actions

I recommend doing at least these cleanup action (within reposurgeon) when converting a repo:

Add an authormap to get nice author names.
Clean up the most uggly commit messages. (Do not wast too much time for this. I did, when converting PyInstallers repo, and the results are nor worth the effort.)
Lift references (e.g. revision numbers to a time-stamp)

I recommend reading at least these sections in the man-page `reposurgeon.1`:

Artifacts removal
Reference Lifting
Working with Subversion

For more insights you may want to read Erics DVCS Migration Guide and have a look at my work done for the PyInstaller repo-conversion. You may also want to read my comments about why I'm now preferring git over mercurial.

[Edit 2014-03-31: Fix typo in script, use repopuller]