Re: How to use git-svn to clone from a mirror?

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Raja R Harinath wrote:

quoted

David Kastrup [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I have used something like

git-svn clone -T trunk -b branches -t tags file:///tmp/rsync-mirror

to clone an rsync mirror of an SVN repository.  Now I want to have 
fetch revert to pulling from the upstream repository in future. 
However, if I change the respective line in .git/config to 
svn://the.svn.link/whatever, git-rebase will fetch the right updates, 
but then says that it can't work with the objects in the git 
repository.

Changing the config back will make git-rebase -l work.

So what would be the right procedure to shift the SVN source from an
rsync mirror to the original, without git-svn breaking?

I think you'll have to

-------------8<------------
  # remove stored revision db, since we're going to change all the commit ids
  rm .git/svn/git-svn/.rev_db.*

  # rewrite git-svn-id: lines
  cg-admin-rewritehist \
	--msg-filter \
	'sed "s,file:///tmp/rsync-mirror,svn://the.svn.link/whatever,"'

  # recreate new revision db, and fetch updates, if any
  git-svn rebase
-------------8<------------

<shameless plug>
	Or you use the just-rewritten version of it, git-filter-branch.
</shameless>

Well, part of the reason I worked from an rsynced copy was to be able
to repeat the experiment by just wasting a few hours of time each
time, without wasting more bandwidth.

What I arrived at was to use
git-svn init -T trunk -t tags -b branches
  --rewrite-root svn://tug.org/texlive file:///mirror/texlive
git-svn fetch --all
[edit .git/config and replace the url and rewrite-root lines with a
 single url line pointing to the root]
git-reset --hard   [don't ask me why]
and afterwards fetches worked online.

I liked the commit messages when using --no-metadata better than with
--rewrite-root, but I found no way to get the resulting archive
operative for git-svn rebase afterwards.

Could someone explain to me why git needs to know the upstream URL
history, whether by --rewrite-root or rewrite-hist or
git-filter-branch?

I find this rather hard to understand, so I would like to get an idea
where this fits naturally into the overall design of git, and how it
makes sense.

Thanks,

-- 
David Kastrup