How to upgrade the SVN version used by git-svn

Question

I've been using git-svn and love it. But we just switched our repo to one that requires a svn version of 1.5.0 or greater. Currently, I've got this:

triedsound-lm:android holmesj$ git svn --version
git-svn version 1.7.3.1 (svn 1.4.4)

triedsound-lm:android holmesj$ svn --version
svn, version 1.6.15 (r1038135)
   compiled Nov 29 2010, 13:32:56

So, when I try to dcommit, I get this error message:

...
...
A repository hook failed: Commit blocked by start-commit hook (exit code 1) with output:
Only clients >= 1.5.0 may commit to this repository.
For upgrade instructions please see:
    http://twiki.corp.yahoo.com/view/Subversion/SubversionFAQ#Upgrade
 at /usr/local/git/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 573

This really sucks, I don't want to stop using git-svn. That would seriously just be awful. It's going to suck if I just have to lump all my git commits into one big svn commit.

Anyone know how to update the svn version that git-svn uses? I'm running this on OSX 10.5

Answer 1

git-svn is written in perl and uses the SVN::Core module, so it uses whatever version of the svn library that module is pointing at. To make git-svn use a newer version of svn, you could probably update the system's SVN::Core module... a sudo cpan SVN::Core might suffice. Alternatively, you may be able to replace the svn libraries in /usr/lib.

I can't do either of the above, since I don't have admin privileges on my work machine. Here's what I did to overcome that. If you take this route, you may need to adjust some of the paths below. I use ~/local/lib, ~/local/bin etc.

Set the following shell variables:

export PERL_MB_OPT="--install_base $HOME/local"
export PERL_MM_OPT="INSTALL_BASE=$HOME/local"

Then run cpan SVN::Core. At some point it'll ask "Would you like to pass any arguments to configure?", to which I answered --libdir=/Users/sean/local/lib --prefix=/Users/sean/local. This'll build a new copy of the svn library, and the perl bindings for it, which will end up in ~/local/lib/perl5/.

Now, in my install of git (from source), git-svn does this:

use lib (split(/:/, $ENV{GITPERLLIB} || "/Users/sean/local/lib/perl5/site_perl"));

So I moved my freshly installed SVN module from ~/local/lib/perl5/ to ~/local/lib/perl5/site_perl. There are a couple things to relocate; your lib/perl5 directory should look something like this:

(It might be easier just to set GITPERLLIB to $HOME/local/lib/perl5 and move Git.pm out of site_perl)

I'm clearly no perl guru, so there's probably a better way to accomplish all this. I can, however, confirm that it works: git-svn version 1.7.3.1 (svn 1.6.12)

Answer 2

If you can use MacPorts a simple port install git-core +svn will install a recent version of both git itself and the svn client and libraries.

$ git svn --version
git-svn version 1.7.3.2 (svn 1.6.15)