git ready

convert git-svn tag branches to real tags

This tip has been generously donated from Alexis Midon. Thanks! His original post is here.

Alexis found out that in the process of converting from Subversion to Git, tags get a bit confused and show up as branches instead once converted over. This can be pretty inconvenient, especially when using git branch since a ton of branches would show up such as tag/1.2, and so on. A little bit of scripting and Git magic can clear this up easily.

He followed the standard process for converting a svn repo:

$ mkdir rails
$ cd rails 
$ git svn init -t tags -b branches -T trunk <path to svn repo>
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
$ git svn fetch

Next he whipped up a little script to convert all of the tag branches into actual tags, and then make sure they’re deleted properly.

$ git-for-each-ref refs/remotes/origin/tags | cut -d / -f 5- |
while read ref
do
git tag -a "$ref" -m"say farewell to SVN" "refs/remotes/origin/tags/$ref"
git push origin ":refs/heads/tags/$ref"
git push origin tag "$ref"
done

If you’ve created scripts that help with converting over to Git from any other SCM, let us know in the comments or submit your own tip!