Converting from Subversion to Git on Windows

• February 9, 2013
• James Skemp
• software, tutorials / guides

With the news that Visual Studio 2012 will support Git out-of-the-box, and me deciding to stop storing my repositories locally, I decided to switch to Git this weekend.

They say the best way to do this is via svn2git, which unfortunately uses Ruby. Since I'm on Windows, and haven't done Ruby development, I needed to download Ruby using RubyInstaller for Windows.

Next I needed to have RubyGems support, which meant downloading from RubyForge.

Unfortunately I had issues installing RubyGems. When I first installed Ruby I decided not to put it in my PATH. However, I couldn't install RubyGems.

c:\Ruby193\bin>ruby.exe ..\rubygems-1.8.25\setup.rb

What I ended up having to do was call Ruby slightly differently.

c:\Ruby193\rubygems-1.8.25>..\bin\ruby.exe setup.rb

However, it seems as though this step may not have even been necessary, since supposedly 1.9+ includes Gem support by default?

Then I got stuck (user credentials/user migration) and decided to search around, which caused me to find that TortoiseGit supported grabbing from SVN, but that requires msysgit. So I download msysgit and install it, unchecking a bunch of options since I don't intend on using TortoiseGit/msysgit after I get everything ported over.

Now I can download and install TortoiseGit.

At this point I'm wondering if I screw having old commit logs. I've already been thinking for a while how poor Windows support with Git is.

...

...

And I ended up just deciding to start fresh.

• git
• subversion