Re: git-svn and a nested branches folder

Russ Brown [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

Hi Russ,

I'm having some trouble with using git-svn to fetch a repository, and I
think it's because the repository doesn't store branches as a flat list
directly under the 'branches' directory.

Basically, we have a structure like this:

|
+-trunk
+-tags
+-branches
  + category-a
    + branch-a
    + branch-b
  + category-b
    + branch-c
    + branch-d

etc. category-a and category-b are simple directories created using svn
mkdir. The branches are created using svn cp.

It helps us to organise the branches better, but the rationale is
besides the point. The problem is that git-svn seems to want to treat
category-a and category-b as branches, which isn't right at all. As a
result, git-svn seems to skip most (if not all) revisions that occur in
these directories and creates a lot of entries in unhandled.log.

This is a known problem with the way git-svn handles branches and tags.
Nested branch (and tags) structures aren't supported with globbing and
so you can't have more than one branches/tags specification in your
config.

I've also encountered an index corruption in one of the
.git/svn/<branch>/index files which I think it probably related.

Not sure about that.  git-svn should detect and attempt to fix index
corruptions (which happened for me since I interrupt git-svn quite
often when working on it).

I've had a quick look at the source myself, but perl isn't my strong
point. What I think it should do is something like recurse down the tree
from the directory given looking for folders that copy from trunk (or
some other branch that already exists). That would work perfectly well
for the default flat branch storage method as well as the one we use.

The globbing functionality of branches in git-svn is some of the ugliest
code I've ever written in my life.  Somehow I got it working for the
simple general cases but I've been afraid to touch it for a while...

The only other problem is in branch naming, which could clash if you
only use the outer-most directory name, so I'd suggest something that
involves concatenating the folders in the path relative to 'branches' to
keep them unique (if git can handle slashes in branch names then all the
better).

As Peter suggested, disable globbing for branches and use explicit
fetch refspecs for now...

-- 
Eric Wong