Problem
How do you create a shallow copy with git-svn from a Subversion repository, e.g. how do you pull only the last three revisions?
The git clone
command can get the last n revisions from a Git repository if you use the option --depth
, i.e. you get a shallow copy of the repository. Example:
git clone --depth 3 git://some/repo myshallowcopyrepo
Is there a similar option for git-svn?
My discoveries so far
So far I've only found the -rN
option where N
is the revision to pull. Example:
git svn clone -rN svn://some/repo
According to the documentation there is the possibility to use -r$REVNUMBER:HEAD
. I tried the following to get the last 3 revisions which returned an error message.
$ git svn clone --prefix=svn/ -s -rHEAD~3:HEAD http://some/svn/repo .
revision argument: HEAD~3:HEAD not understood by git-svn
So I replaced HEAD~3
with the actual number of the third but last revision 534. That worked, but that requires me to first figure out the revision number of the third but last commit.
$ git svn clone --prefix=svn/ -s -r534:HEAD http://some/svn/repo .
Documentation
-s is for --stdlayout which presumes the svn recommended layout for tags, trunk, and branches.
(but didn't work for me)
--depth
for git svn
, since the support is already there. And it already has to find out the latest rev from the server?
You've already discovered the simplest way to specify a shallow clone in Git-SVN, by specifying the SVN revision number that you want to start your clone at ( -r$REV:HEAD
).
For example: git svn clone -s -r1450:HEAD some/svn/repo
Git's data structure is based on pointers in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which makes it trivial to walk back n
commits. But in SVN ( and therefore in Git-SVN) you will have to find the revision number yourself.
I find myself using the following often to get a limited number of revisions out of our huge subversion tree (we're soon reaching svn revision 35000).
# checkout a specific revision
git svn clone -r N svn://some/repo/branch/some-branch
# enter it and get all commits since revision 'N'
cd some-branch
git svn rebase
And a good way to find out where a branch started is to do a svn log
it and find the first one on the branch (the last one listed when doing):
svn log --stop-on-copy svn://some/repo/branch/some-branch
So far I have not really found the hassle worth it in tracking all branches. It takes too much time to clone and svn and git don't work together as good as I would like. I tend to create patch files and apply them on the git clone of another svn branch.
cherry-pick
/rebase
between those. Commit takes an extra step (push
, then dcommit
from remote repo), but I think it's worth the tradeoff.
... 7 years later, in the desert, a tumbleweed blows by ...
I wasn't satisfied with the accepted answer so I created some scripts to do this for you available on Github. These should help anyone who wants to use git svn clone
but doesn't want to clone the entire repository and doesn't want to hunt for a specific revision to clone from in the middle of the history (maybe you're cloning a bunch of repos). Here we can just clone the last N revisions:
Use git svn clone
to clone the last 50 revisions
# -u The SVN URL to clone
# -l The limit of revisions
# -o The output directory
./git-svn-cloneback.sh -u https://server/project/trunk -l 50 -o myproj --authors-file=svn-authors.txt
Find the previous N revision from an SVN repo
# -u The SVN URL to clone
# -l The limit of revisions
./svn-lookback.sh -u https://server/project/trunk -l 5
I have had the error several times "revision argument: :HEAD not understood by git-svn"
it works by increasing the number of revision limits
for example 100 instead of 50
./git-svn-cloneback.sh -u https://server/project/trunk -l 100 -o myproj --authors-file=svn-authors.txt
Success story sharing
git-svn
remote pointing at the same place and usinggit-svn fetch
to get more of the tree. At that point you have to usegit filter-branch
to reparent the old (partial) tree onto the right branch.n
commits ...