Git SVN and merging branches

Question

I am working on a svn project with two branches, lets call them

trunk
branches/foo

My idea is to clone the whole svn repository (telling git which folder are trunk, tags and branches), do the merge in git and then copy my merge to a svn working copy and commit the changes from svn.

In this workflow, will I be able to use gits merging power or will that only work for branches created with git itself?

Answer 1

Create alias for checkout command:

git config alias.co checkout

Make sure that you local branches are up to date:

git co master    # checkout branch that tracks subversion's trunk
git svn rebase 
git co local/foo # checkout branch that tracks subversion's branches/foo
                 # It assumes that  the branch is created with the command:
                 # `git co -b local/foo remotes/foo`
                 # And the repo was created with:
                 # `git svn clone --stdlayout SVN_REPO_URL`
git svn rebase 

Merge branches:

# create new local branch based on `master`
git co master
git co -b merging_branch_foo 
# merge, resolve conflicts, etc (pure git)
git merge local/foo  

# rebase `merging_branch_foo` to linearize history for subversion
git rebase master # or `rebase -i`

# merge `merging_branch_foo` into `master`
git co master
git merge merging_branch_foo # --squash to create single commit

# commit changes to svn
git svn dcommit

# (optionally) delete `merging_branch_foo`
git branch -D merging_branch_foo