Transferring an SVN repository to Gitorious

Moving SVN repositories to Git is obviously inherently a good idea since Git is a far better vcs. I needed to transfer a very large SVN repository to Gitorious and it did take me a while to figure out how to do it. Turned out git-svn is not the best tool for this. I tried and it took almost two days to fetch the svn repository as a git repository.

Then I found the svn2git Ruby script and that did the trick. Here's how:

• Start by installing git-core and git-svn. Obviously you also need a Ruby environment and the gem package.
  
• Then install svn2git:

gem install svn2git --source http://gemcutter.org

• Then you need to create a committers list because svn has user id's whereas git uses email addresses to identify committers:
  

  svn log | grep -E "r[0-9]+ \| [a-z]+ \|" | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq > committers.txt

• Edit this file so that each user id has a unique email address in the form of

user_id = User Name <user@email.com>

• Then fetch the repository:

 svn2git svn://server/path/to/repo --authors committers.txt

• At this point, create the repository into Gitorious.
• Finally, push the contents to Gitorious:

git push --all git@gitorious.org:project/repo.git

And that's it. Just took me a few tries to get the svn repository converted correctly.