'Can't create session Unable to connect to repo' when trying to migrate svn to git

Question

I'm trying to migrate my local svn repo to git. I've been following the steps on this post: How to migrate SVN repository with history to a new Git repository?

More specifically, this answer (seemed like the simplest). The problem is whenever I try and fetch from my svn repo I keep getting the :

Can't create session: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'file:///mypathtorepo'

My repo is currently sitting on my local computer which is why I'm using the 'file:///' directory path. I've also tried 'svn://localhost/mypathtorepo' to no avail. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

git-svn is not the right tool for one-time conversions of repositories or repository parts. 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 pleny 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. And as it needs the repository files locally anyway, you have the best pre-requisites.

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.

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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

There are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)

Answer 2

file:/// is most likely not working due to your SVN repo having a FS format that is newer that what Git is aware of.

Your second approach with svn://localhost was in the right direction. However, you need to host the repo with the svnserve command line utility. Something like:

svnserve -d -R --root file://path/to/repo

After getting svnserve to properly host the repo, you can use the path beginning with: svn://localhost