Problems with importing a Subversion repository

Carsten Fuchs carsten.fuchs at cafu.de
Sat Oct 20 09:23:05 UTC 2012


Hi all,

unfortunately, I've not been able to complete the conversion of our repository from 
Subversion to Hg.

The problems were that the initial import of the repository did not complete 
successfully, as I described in my first post in this thread, and that even if it had 
completed properly, I'm not sure how I would have done any clean-up and post-processing 
of the history (this is largely my fault though, I'm sure that if I had spent more time 
on it, there had also been a solution).


In comparison, in a procedure that involved a lot of steps and effort (and was far from 
painless), I was able to convert our repository from Subversion to Git. If you're 
interested, I've written down all the encountered problems, and the steps and 
considerations that comprise my solution:

If you want to skip all the prose and have a short read, directly jump to:
http://www.cafu.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5393#p5393

I wrote my entire story in two parts, quasi as a postmortem of the conversion to Git. In 
case you care for the details, they're at:
http://www.cafu.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1090
http://www.cafu.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1092


Now I'm wondering if all these steps had been possible with Mercurial as well, and if 
so, how? (I worked with Git not because I prefer it over Mercurial, but only because it 
made it possible to do these things.)

And the next thought was obviously, while already having a very nice conversion to Git, 
why not proceed from there (and skip all attempts of re-doing it all in Hg)?
The full conversion would be

	Subversion --> Git --> Mercurial

and I was happy to find https://bitbucket.org/durin42/hg-git that seems to be the 
perfect tool for the task (I've not yet tried it, but doing so will be my next step).


Alas, while thanks to hg-git my conversion seems to come to a good end so that we can 
finally start(!) productive working with Hg, I wished that Hg had made the original 
conversion of slightly non-standard Subversion repositories a little easier and reliable 
than it is. As I mentioned above, this may in part be my own fault, and I'd be more than 
happy to stand corrected.

In any case, with the conversion now done, I'm now looking forward to *really* getting 
started with Hg!  :-)

Best regards,
Carsten



-- 
    Cafu - the open-source Game and Graphics Engine
for multiplayer, cross-platform, real-time 3D Action
           Learn more at http://www.cafu.de



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