Author not defined when importing SVN repository into Git

Question

I'm trying to import our SVN repository into Git. When I run either this command:

git svn --authors-file=/path/to/authors --trunk=trunk clone https://my-repo/project . 

or this command:

svn2git https://my-repo/project --no-minimize-url -v --authors /path/to/authors 

Both return this error:

Author: patrick  not defined in /path/to/authors file 

..but as far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with my authors file:

$ grep patrick /path/to/authors patrick = Patrick <[email protected]> 

That error doesn't happen until it gets to revision 8700, so it must be grabbing the other author names correctly.

What could be going on here? Thanks.

Answer 1

I've had the same issue when trying to execute this on Windows. It turned out that the encoding of the file that I stored the authors in was set to UTF-8 instead of UTF-8 without BOM. As the "with BOM" version adds some additional bytes to the beginning of the file, the first author in the list was never found.

Answer 2

I had the same problem but the cause was actually rather different: I used Powershell to dump the authors list from SVN and I didn't realized that it saved the result as a UTF-16 file.

It turned out git (at least, up to git for windows version 2.16.1) is unable to use UTF-16 files. Converting the file to UTF-8 did the trick for me.