Postings by Mathias on June 16, 2007
Saving Bandwidth with git-svn
git-svn is a cool tool to have the joy of local branches and git's outstanding performance, whilest working with a Subversion repository. Unfortunatly git-svn has the disadvantage of wasting insane amounts of bandwidth when cloning a Subversion repository: Cloning for instance the GTK+ repository costs serveral gigs of bandwidth - just do end with about 200 MB of compressed data on your disk. It's told this happens due a bug in Subversion's language bindings the godfathers SVN did not care about yet - although patches exists.
Having just 5 GB per month to waste, this big appetite is a real problem, but fortunatly I realized how to deal with it:
- run
git-svn cloneon a machine with cheap internet connection, like for instance your virtual web server. - call
git repackon the cheap machine - let
rsynctransfer the compressed repository to your home
This also should work for relocating a git-svn repository, when the URL of the SVN repo changed.
Update: Eric Wong - the maintainer of git-svn - has patched Subversion packages for Debian.
