Subversion to git transition

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

We're switching the Miro repository from svn to git. This frees us up considerably and will make development life a lot easier for us. We chose git over other dvcs systems because most of us were already using git-svn to access svn and we're already using git for Miro Guide, Miro Community, Miro Fullscreen and other projects.

For the last week or so, I've been converting the Miro svn repository to git. It's taken a long time because I ran into several complications:

  1. I've been moving from an apartment to a house which sucked up a few days.

  2. We treated tags in svn like branches: we'd tag a release, then make some adjustments "in the tag". Tags in git are immutable which is a good thing--they should be immutable. I've spent a bunch of time figuring out how to convert our svn tags into git tags and tweak the history accordingly. It takes around 20 minutes to fix each instance of the problem and there were a lot of instances of it--one for each release, release candidate, beta, .... Many many thanks to James Vega for helping me out on this.

  3. I'm running out of disk space on my laptop. I've had to do some archiving to free up space and that's taken a while.

Hopefully, I'll be done in the next day or so. Once I finish, I'll push the new git repository to a public space, have the other devs run through it for issues, post a message about it on the develop mailing list and then I'll start work on changing build scripts and other things like that to use the git repository rather than the svn one.

One thing that's happened as a result of this work is that I've really come to appreciate git internals and how it's all structured. I have no idea how Bazaar and Mercurial structure things, but git's pretty neat.

Updates:

8/17/2009: My math was way off. I've got another 50 tags to go at 20 minutes per tag that's at least another couple of days.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.