SteveStreeting.com

Git is picky when it comes to converting large, moderately complex Subversion repositories and so far the only option I’ve found that works reliably is using the very latest version on Linux. Forget about using 1.6.5 on Windows via msysGit, at least for the git-svn conversion it’s very, very unreliable. Similarly I found Git 1.5 on Linux very flaky for the svn conversion. This doesn’t give me the greatest confidence in Git but in order to properly explore all the angles, I’ve committed to making it work even if it means I have to monkey about a bit.

So, I installed a fresh Kubuntu 9.04 (and of course, 9.10 went stable a few days later) and tried to build Git 1.6.5 from source. The configure script is unfortunately a bit rubbish and doesn’t bother trying to detect the dependencies though, so for those that don’t want to go through the fail/retry build loop I went through, here are the packages you’ll want to install via apt from a clean version:

• build-essential
• curl
• libcurl3
• tk
• subversion
• libsvn-perl
• cpio
• zlib
• zlibg1-dev
• expat
• perl
• iconv

If like me you use the excellent wajig wrapper around apt, you can also do ‘wajig build-depend git-svn’, but that seems to install things that are not strictly necessary in the default build (but maybe are needed with some non-standard options).

sudo apt-get install curl
   41  sudo apt-get install libcurl
   49  sudo apt-get install tk8.4
   53  sudo apt-get install cpio expat
   55  sudo apt-get install zlib
   61  sudo apt-get install build-essential
   66  sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
   72  sudo apt-get install asciidoc
   75  sudo apt-get install xmlto