Leaving svk for git

written by Cristi Balan on 2007-08-14

Note: If you don’t care about why I moved to git and just want the practical bits, you can go directly to Using git to track changes between svn repositories

A?Por que?

I often find myself having several patches to open source projects piling up in my local checkouts. It’s a pain to keep them together until they get applied upstream, if that ever happens.

Being able to commit without internet access is also required. I’m not usually on a fuckin plane, but I like working from some nice places where I can’t get online.

So, I definitely need something else than subversion that could talk nicely with subversion, to keep me happy.

Besides svn tracking and offline commits, I’d like to have piston like functionality out of the box, but I can live without that.

svk

A while ago I started to use svk to mirror some of the svn repositories I work with on a regular basis. I based my setup on octopod’s svk tutorial.

I didn’t quite enjoy the smerge and creating of a bunch of directories. Each time I wanted to add a new project, or even worse, a new project for a new mirrored repository I had to be very careful about a bunch of things. Not fun!

I also tried to import a local branch of a svn repository in a directory of a local branch of another one and tried to push that to my svn own repository. FAIL! “thingy is from another repository”. Bummer…

That last paragraph might not have made too much sense if you’re not familiar with octopod’s tutorial and svk so feel free to ignore it.

git

Im not a mad brancher so I mainly used svk as a fancy svn client. Also, my svk setup is a bit of a mess. It was easier for me to ignore the svk repository, recreate mirrors and reapply some patches in git.

However, if you want to import your whole svk into git, have a look at the introduction to git-svn for Subversion/svk users and deserters

In the next article I’ll show how to do a setup similar to the one in octopod’s tutorial. Go to Using git to track changes between svn repositories

Comments

Will be imported into disqus real soon.

Options:

Size

Colors