I recently switched a bunch of my projects over to git. Why? All the cool kids are doing it, I figured I’d give it a shot. Either way I ran into a few bumps with the git-svn stuff. Everything went really well until I tried to push back my changes from git. I’d been committing changes to my repo and pushing them to github/hasno without issue. I ran into errors when I tried to git-svn dcommit.

Here’s what I’m currently calling the right way, as usual ymmv:

1. 
   init if you haven’t done i already, check .git/config for an svn-remote entry…
   git-svn init <repo url>
2. pull the svn revision information. a bunch of info should scroll by matching svn revisions to git sha1 revisions.
   git-svn fetch
3. this will yeild a list of local & remote branches, you should see trunk in the list
   git branch -a

   
   
   * master
   
     origin/HEAD
   
     origin/local-svn
   
     origin/master
   
     tags/release-0.1.23
   
     tags/release-0.2.42
   
     tags/release-0.2.44
   
     tags/release-0.2.50
   
     trunk
   
      

4. switch to a local branch based on the trunk remote branch
   afaik you really don’t want to be doing any of this type of stuff in a remote branch
   git checkout -b local-svn trunk
5. now we need to pull your local changes from your master branch to your local-svn branch
   git merge master
   it’s worth noting that you could do a git rebase, but when I tried that I couldn’t use git-svn dcommit
6. go through and merge any conflicts. then git commit. at this point you can git dcommit

So if all that was how I got it working, what did I run into along the way… Well I’m glad you ask. Here’s a list of errors and the reason for them afaik:

Unable to determine upstream SVN information from HEAD history

You have a recent commit that doesn’t have any history in .git/ref/remote/svn or .git/svn. It also doesn’t have the git-svn-id: key in the commit message.

[svn-remote "svn"] unknown

Did you manually create the svn-remote entry, or specify a different name? If so you need to pass that on to the commands, they seem to assume it’s named svn.

fatal: bad default revision ‘refs/remotes/git-svn’

Somethings amiss with your svn-remote entry in .git/config

That’s about it for me, if you’ve seen those errors and can add some detail or shed some light on a better way please do share. As of this moment ruby-hl7 is synched up.

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posted on April 03, 2008