Fix parentless commits after git svn clone

Question

I have converted a Subversion repository into a git one with:

git svn clone --no-metadata --stdlayout --prefix svn/ 

it worked well, but I have some holes in the repository, I think that it means that git svn was not able to find the parents:

A----B---C---D (2.0)      E --- F --- G (2.1)

Here, the first commit of the 2.1 branch has no parent, but it should have the 2.0 branch as parent.

I tried rebasing, but it failed with conflicts, is there a way of fixing these links ?

I think here that it is not working because E also gets all the commits prior it. The content seems to be correct, but the history is not.

Answer 1

Yes, the 2.1 branch has no parent because git svn could not find a parent.

This is usually caused by an SVN branch that was not created using svn copy, but by locally copying the files, then svn adding and committing them. In that case, the SVN commit does not include the information where it was copied from, so git svn cannot know what to use as the ancestor. This is a bad practice (in SVN), but it's too late now.

How to fix this:

As far as I can see, git rebase should indeed work in this case. Something like:

git checkout 2.1
git rebase 2.0

I just tested this: I created a simple SVN repo that created a branch as described above, cloned it using git svn and rebased the branch, and it worked.

If you are getting conflicts, there is something else getting in the way. In that case, we can probably only help with a test case.

Can you create a minimal testcase by building a dummy repo? Or can you anonymize the repo using git fast-export with option --anonymize? Then please post the testcase somewhere.