git2svn unable to create symlink (File name too long)

Question

I installed svn2git to quickly convert SVN repositories to GIT. I tried the converting procedure on a different machine (Ubuntu 16.04) and a different SVN repository which worked without a problem.

Right now I am on Linux Mint Cinnamon with a different (but very simillar) SVN repository.

git clone https://my.git.com/repository.git
cd repository
svn2git svn://my.svn.com/repository --authors ../authors_transform.txt

.
.
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error: unable to create symlink asp/layer/man/rep/onewith_totalmax_victory.php (File name too long)
read-tree -m -u -v HEAD HEAD: command returned error: 128

I have read about the /home encryption possibility (as a file length limit), which is not my case. Tried touching random string

touch Etiam_tortor_est0_placerat_sit_amet_dolor_in0_ultricies_malesuada_nisi-_Aenean_et_urna_enim-_Vivamus_porta0_velit_et_pulvinar_fermentum0_urna_lacus_tempor_sapien0_et_laoreet_tellus_elit_nec_ligula-_Nulla_iaculis0_libero_eget_rutrum_mattis0_nisl_velit_vive

Which is 256 characters and creates the file.

How to deal with this?

EDIT: The problem occurs on macOS Sierra aswell.

Answer 1

Conversion broke the symlink try this:

git clone --no-checkout https://my.git.com/repository.git
cd repository
git config core.symlinks false
git checkout <branch>

Answer 2

After all it seems it has been an issue with a specific file that was symlink and a file at the same time?

Anyways manually fixing the file in SVN and then performing the conversion fixed the issue.

Answer 3

The svn2git tool you used uses git-svn under the hood, so it is not suitable for "quickly convert" an SVN repository.

There are pleny 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.

The svn2git you used is based on git-svn and 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.

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.

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Even though git-svn (or the wrong svn2git in your case) 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

There are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)