If your Subversion repository has been used from different people, you are probably interested in preserving the commit author's name, which is true even in the new Git repository.

If you have the awk command available (maybe using Cygwin in Windows), there is a script here that fetches all the users from Subversion logs and appends them to a text file we can use in Git while cloning to perfectly match the Subversion users, even in Git-converted commits:

$ svn log -q | awk -F '|' '/^r/ {sub("^ ", "", $2); sub(" $", "", $2); print $2" = "$2" <"$2">"}' | sort -u > authors.txt

Now we will use the authors.txt file in the next cloning step.

To begin the migration, we have to locally clone the Subversion repository as we did before; I recommend once more adding the --stdlayout option to preserve the branches and tags and then to add the -A option to let Git convert commit authors while cloning:

$ git svn clone <repo-url> --stdlayout –-prefix svn/ -A authors.txt

In case the Subversion repository has trunks, branches, and tags located in other paths (with no standard layout), Git provides you with a way to specify them with the --trunk, --branches, and --tags options:

$ git svn clone <repo-url> --trunk=<trunk-folder> --branches=<branches-subfolder> --tags=<tags-subfolder>

When you fire the clone command, remember that this operation can be time- consuming; in a repository with 1000 commits, it is not unusual to wait 15 to 30 minutes for this.

To preserve the previously ignored files in Subversion, we can append the svn:ignore settings to the .gitignore file:

$ git svn show-ignore >> .gitignore
$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Convert svn:ignore properties to .gitignore"

Now that we have a local copy of our repository, we can move it to a brand new Git repository. Here you can already use a remote repository on your server of choice, which can even be GitHub or Bitbucket, but I recommend that you use a local bare repository; we may as well do some other little adjustments (like renaming tags and branches) before pushing files to a blessed repository. So, first initialize a bare repository in a folder of your choice:

$ mkdir ReposMyGitRepo.git
$ cd ReposMyGitRepo.git
$ git init --bare

Now make the default branch to match the Subversion trunk branch name:

$ git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/trunk

Then add a bare remote pointing to the bare repository just created:

$ cd SourcesMySvnRepo
$ git remote add bare file:///C/Repos/MyGitRepo.git

Finally push the local cloned repository to the new bare one:

$ git push --all bare

We now have a brand new bare repository that is a perfect copy of the original Subversion repository. We can now adjust branches and tags to better fit the usual Git layout.

Now we can rename branches and tags to obtain a more Git-friendly scenario.

$ git branch -m trunk master

$ git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/tags |
cut -d / -f 4 |
while read ref
do
  git tag "$ref" "refs/heads/tags/$ref";
  git branch -D "tags/$ref";
done

You now have a local bare Git repository ready to be pushed to a remote server; the result of the conversion is a full Git repository, where branches, tags, and commit history have been preserved. The only thing you have to do by hand is to eventually accommodate Git users.