git-svn and svn:externals

Continuing on with yesterday’s theme of revision control, I decided to post a little bit about how I’m using VCS these days. I’ve moved to using git as a front-end for SVN, using a workflow that follows along the paths laid out here and here. Eventually, I’ll probably look into using partial clones as outlined here.

Since I recently moved to using “svn:externals”: in my main repo, I spent some time this morning looking for information on how to get git-svn to pull these external trees, and here are a few resources I found:

Life and Hacking: svn:externals for noobs!
SVN’s svn:externals to GIT’s Submodule for Rails Plugins
Phly, boy, phly: svn:externals

None of these have actually solved the problem for me yet (I think I may be fighting against the fact that I’m using debian’s packaged git instead of the newest upstream), so I have begun looking into alternatives. This article suggested I look into braid and/or piston, as well as pointing to svnmerge.py, which can assist with automatic branch management. I’ll be trying a few of these out over the coming weeks and will post my findings here.