UPDATE I’ve pushed a few bug fixes; see this
entry for details.
At Creative Commons we’re a
dual-[D]VCS shop. Since we started
self-hosting our
repositories
last year we’ve been using both
Subversion
and git. The
rationale was pragmatic more than anything else: we have lots of code
spread across many small projects and don’t have the time (or desire) to
halt everything and cut over from one system to the other. This approach
hasn’t been without it’s pain but I think that overall it’s been a good
one. When we create projects we tend to create them in git and when we
do major refactoring we move things over. It’s also given
[STRIKEOUT:recalcitrant staff] me time to adjust my thinking to git.
Adjustments like this usually involve lots of swearing, fuming and muttering.
As I’ve become more comfortable with git and its collection of support
tools, I’ve found myself wanting to use git
svn to
work on projects that remain in Subversion. One issue I’ve run into is
our reliance on svn:externals. We use externals extensively in our
repository which has generally made it easy to share large chunks of
code and data, and still be able to check out the complete dependencies
for a project and get to
work[1]_. More than
once I’ve thought “oh, I’ll just clone that using git-svn so I can work
on it on the
plane[2]_,” only to
realize that there are half a dozen externals I’d need to handle as well.
Last week I decided that tools like
magit make git too useful
not to use when I’m coding and that I needed to address the “externals
issues“. I didn’t want to deal with a mass conversion, I just wanted
to get the code from Subversion into the same layout in git. I found
git-me-up which was
close, but which baked in what I assume are Rails conventions that our
projects don’t conform to. Something like this may already exist, but
the result of my work is a little tool,
**gsc** — “git subversion clone”.
gsc works by cloning a Subversion repository using git svn and then
recursively looks for externals to fetch. If it finds an external, it
does a shallow clone of the target (only fetching the most recent
revision instead of the full history). The result is a copy of your
project you can immediately start working on. Of course, it also
inherits some of the constraints associated with svn:externals. If
you want to work on code contained in an external (and push it back to
the Subversion repository) you may need to check out the code
manually[3]_. Of
course, the beauty of DVCS is that there’s nothing stopping you from
committing to the read-only clone locally and then pushing the changes
via
email
to a reviewer.
You can grab gsc from gitorious. There are
also installation instructions and basic usage information in the
README.
| date: | 2009-07-21 09:47:17 |
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| wordpress_id: | 1073 |
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| layout: | post |
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| slug: | git-svn-and-svnexternals |
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| comments: | |
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| category: | development |
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| tags: | cc, git, git-svn, gsc, svn, svn:externals |
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