"git pull <remote> master" into a sub-directory

Question

Background:

I'm trying to move a package from an SVN repo to a GIT repo, while preserving it's history.

Steps:

• I've used git-svn to generate a GIT repository for the SVN one.
• I'm following the steps mentioned here to move the code from one GIT repository to the other, while preserving history.

I'd like to move that package into it's own sub-directory in the destination git repository. However, I'm stuck at this step: git pull <remote> master --allow-unrelated-histories

This pulls the code into the top level git directory. How do I pull that code into a sub-directory instead?

I've tried the following based on some SO answers, but that didn't work:

• git pull -work-tree <working_dir> -git-dir <working_dir> <remote> master
• git pull -s subtree -Xsubtree=<path_prefix> <remote> master

Clean up step:

The package will be maintained in the destination GIT repo, so I intend to:

• delete it from the SVN repo.
• And, also delete the intermediate GIT repo which will not be required once the package has been moved.

Answer 1

If you wanted to import that SVN history into its own subfolder, you would need to import it into its own separate git repo.

Then you can

• add that git repo as a submodule of the main Git repo: that would create a subfolder.
• Or, a better fit would be a subtree merging: see here.

Answer 2

That link you quote does not have anything to do with SVN.

Anyway, for a one-time migration git-svn is not the right tool for conversions of repositories or parts of repositories. It is a great tool if you want to use Git as frontend for an existing SVN server, but for one-time conversions you should not use git-svn, but svn2git which is much more suited for this use-case.

There are plenty tools called svn2git, the probably best one is the KDE one from https://github.com/svn-all-fast-export/svn2git. I strongly recommend using that svn2git tool. It is the best I know available out there and it is very flexible in what you can do with its rules files.

You will be easily able to configure svn2gits rule file to produce the result you want from your current SVN layout, including any complex histories like yours that might exist and including producing several Git repos out of one SVN repo or combining different SVN repos into one Git repo cleanly in one run if you like.

If you are not 100% about the history of your repository, svneverever from http://blog.hartwork.org/?p=763 is a great tool to investigate the history of an SVN repository when migrating it to Git.

---

Even though git-svn is easier to start with, here are some further reasons why using the KDE svn2git instead of git-svn is superior, besides its flexibility:

• the history is rebuilt much better and cleaner by svn2git (if the correct one is used), this is especially the case for more complex histories with branches and merges and so on
• the tags are real tags and not branches in Git
• with git-svn the tags contain an extra empty commit which also makes them not part of the branches, so a normal fetch will not get them until you give --tags to the command as by default only tags pointing to fetched branches are fetched also. With the proper svn2git tags are where they belong
• if you changed layout in SVN you can easily configure this with svn2git, with git-svn you will loose history eventually
• with svn2git you can also split one SVN repository into multiple Git repositories easily
• or combine multiple SVN repositories in the same SVN root into one Git repository easily
• the conversion is a gazillion times faster with the correct svn2git than with git-svn

You see, there are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)