Randolph There’s an interesting bug I ran across tonight while converting a large SVN repository (containing over 4100 revisions and 52 400 objects) to Git, using git svn clone. The clone failed at r1000 and left me with an incomplete repository.
I did some searching and came across several articles on StackOverflow. The one that is still open in my browser is this one, which sums it up quite well:
Is it possible to clone a git repository which has more than one revisions? We tried to do it, and after the 1000’th commit it does a GC and exits leaving the clone in a unusable state.
While I didn’t have duplication in my .config file per the above question, I did have to run git svn fetch manually, several more times, to get the rest of the SVN revisions down properly.
My whole aim of converting is fairly obvious: Git is faster and uses less space than SVN, doesn’t have those crazy .svn folders everywhere, not to mention its superior branch and merge functionality. For comparative purposes, I was able to go from 176MB to 86.5MB (a saving of 51%) by converting this single repository.
The original source control used on this project was Visual SourceSafe, which I converted to SVN a couple of years ago using VSS2SVN. The VSS repository was over 1GB in size, so I’ve effectively recovered over 91% of my storage, just by using proper source control.