git svn clone fails with "error: git-svn died of signal 11"

Question

I am trying to move my huge SVN repository into Git using a Ubuntu 16.4 machine. For this purpose I am following this tutorial:

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/svn-to-git-prepping-your-team-migration

I have installed the latest Git, SVN and git-svn tools.

My problem is that each time I rung the 'git svn clone' command I am getting this error 'error: git-svn died of signal 11' without any further information.

Searching a bit in this forum I found another post:

git svn clone died of signal 11 under cygwin

That took me to this web site for a solution:

http://pwizardry.com/devlog/index.cgi/2010/03/29#svn2git

Asking to resume the process using 'git svn fetch'. I did so and it seemed to work as the process went on for one more day. Unfortunately it has stopped again with the same error and the 'git svn fetch' doesn't seem to help any.

I would like to know if someone has experienced this problem or how could I find any traces because all i get is this error without any further explanation.

EDIT:

So I continued searching regarding this issue and I found that you could get some more information if using 'valgrind', and so I did, and now the 'git svn fetch' stops in another point with this message:

==17006== Warning: invalid file descriptor -1 in syscall close()
==17006== 
==17006== HEAP SUMMARY:
==17006==     in use at exit: 43,779,830 bytes in 71,103 blocks
==17006==   total heap usage: 7,178,701 allocs, 7,107,598 frees, 2,123,468,574 bytes allocated
==17006== 
==17006== LEAK SUMMARY:
==17006==    definitely lost: 156,556 bytes in 40 blocks
==17006==    indirectly lost: 156,338 bytes in 51 blocks
==17006==      possibly lost: 43,394,719 bytes in 70,805 blocks
==17006==    still reachable: 72,217 bytes in 207 blocks
==17006==                       of which reachable via heuristic:
==17006==                         newarray           : 53,032 bytes in 1,637 blocks
==17006==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==17006== Rerun with --leak-check=full to see details of leaked memory
==17006== 
==17006== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==17006== ERROR SUMMARY: 2 errors from 1 contexts (suppressed: 0 from 0)

Any idea what is this?

EDIT 2:

I see now that running my normal 'git svn fetch' says all is done... I don't see how the use of 'valgrind' affected but it seems that it helped finishing the job.

Answer 1

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.

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.

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.

---

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

You see, there are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)

Answer 2

This problem is fixed in the libsvn-perl 1.9.4.

libsvn-perl

bugs.debian.org