Make linear master branch git

Question

I have imported my SVN repository into new git bare repository.

My tags are converted in git tags but i have this git road lines :

Is there a method to bring everything back to a single line in the master ?

Like this :

(I am beginner with git)

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

All you have to do is to move the tags to the correct commits (their parent commit). You can do this manually, one by one, using the command:

git tag -f v2.8.0 v2.8.0~1

Replace v2.8.0 with the name of each tag.

If there are a lot of tags to move you can use git tag -l > tags.txt to produce their list and save it into the tags.txt file. Open the file in a text editor and remove the tags that you don't want to modify (if the image posted in the question displays the current history line, only v2.8.2 and v2.8.3 are properly placed; remove them from the file). Save the file then run:

for t in $(cat tags.txt); do git tag -f $t ${t}~1; done

It will process all the tags from the file.

Update:
In order to push the updated positions of the tags to the upstream repository, run:

git push --force --tags origin

Replace origin with the name(s) of all remote repositories where you want to push the tags.

Answer 2

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.

From your screenshot I can see that you most probably used a tool that is based on git-svn like e. g. the nirvdrum svn2git, as these "tag branches" are one of the drawbacks of using git-svn.

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 with your history, either with integrating all SVN sub-repos in one Git repo, or splitting your projects from SVN to multiple independent Git repositories.

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. :-)