Table of Contents

The official FreeBSD Git repo is now at https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/

Clone TL;DR: (public-mirror) https://git.FreeBSD.org/src.git ssh://anongit@git.FreeBSD.org/src.git (developers-only) ssh://git@gitrepo.FreeBSD.org/src.git

The content of this page needs to be updated, please refer to the latest doc from git migration WG at https://github.com/bsdimp/freebsd-git-docs/ , and the discussion on https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-git .

Update: 2020-12-14: These are not the repositories for the 2020/2021 svn to git conversion, please see the note above. The below is mostly historic information and will soon be entirely obsolete.

Introduction

This page used to describe the inofficial git mirrors of the SVN repositories of the FreeBSD project that could be used as common repositories to base other work on.

The repositories were read-only mirrors of the src, doc and, ports FreeBSD Subversion repositories

Bear in mind that git does not replace use of Subversion in FreeBSD and the repository is currently offered on a best-effort basis only. The steps to recreate the conversion are outlined below, so that people can replicate the process in-house should they wish to.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: It is possible that the repositories might need to be re-done due to bugs in the converter. This would result in changed commit IDs for the impacted branches. As the actual tree objects for a certain SVN revision will remain identical, it will always be possible to rebase or merge your work on these new branches and not run into any merge conflicts. Advance notice will be provided if this proves necessary, along with advice on the required git commands.

In fact, “bad SVN metadata” escaped into the published repos on github.com, so they will be re-rolled at some future date.

Repositories

The repository mirrors are updated at least hourly. Should they lag the SVN repository by more than a day, please create a new Bugzilla Issue: Git Integration. Monitoring still needs to be put into place, help wanted btw.

As of 2020-12-14, canonical repository of doc has been migrate to git:

ports:

src:

Quick Start

$ git clone --config remote.origin.fetch='+refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*' https://github.com/YourGitUserName/freebsd.git
$ cd freebsd && git pull   # For some reason, the notes will not be fetched during the clone operation ...
(hack, hack, hack)
$ git commit

Advanced, useful examples to show the diff between a subdir of a branch, or the commits that introduced these diffs. It is basically what svn mergeinfo --show-revs=eligible does. See git-log(1) for more info. 

$ git diff origin/stable/9 master -- usr.sbin/acpi
$ git log --graph --format=oneline --right-only --cherry-pick --no-merges origin/stable/9...origin/master -- usr.sbin/acpi

See any other git howto or documentation if you're stuck on the basics. A useful reference for the issue with notes is Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress.

Adding SVN Revision Notes to an Existing Clone

The git notes in the Github repositories contain useful information, and show up in git-log if present. git-clone without the --config ... line from above will default to not cloning refs/notes. You can configure the local git repo to fetch notes like so: 

$ cd freebsd
$ git config --add remote.origin.fetch '+refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*'
$ git fetch   # It's many MB for src, will take some time

It will add lines to your git log output like this: 

Notes:
    svn path=/head/; revision=277815

Integration

Using git-svn

Using git-svn

Merging pull requests from GitHub using git-svn

Note: This only applies to, and works for committers

Merging pull requests from GitHub

FAQ

Everything done is so that everybody can verify the integrity of the conversion using the tools mentioned in this article. Hence the focus on repeat-ability of the process.

Known Problems

September 2019 notes/commits force push

Sometime around September 2019, refs/notes/commits was force-pushed, breaking fast-forward fetch. If you had a copy of notes before this, git fetch won't automatically update notes do to this change. To force reset your local copy to the new copy, use: 

$ git fetch -f <freebsd> refs/notes/commits:refs/notes/<commits_note_name>

Where freebsd is the name of your FreeBSD Git remote (if you're not sure, try origin). Here, commits_note_name is the name of your local copy of FreeBSD refs/notes/commits (if you followed the procedure in this wiki page, try commits).

Verification

Content

Verifying that the git export is identical to the SVN tree (in content), can be done like this: 

$ svn export --ignore-keywords svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head freebsd.svn
...
Exported revision 243246.
$ git clone --config remote.origin.fetch='+refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*' https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git freebsd.git
$ cd freebsd.git && git pull
$ git log
<We see that revision 243246 is git commit f9ebae3>
$ git checkout f9ebae3
$ cd ../freebsd.svn
$ git --git-dir ../freebsd.git/.git diff
<There should be no output, i.e. no diff>

History

To verify the history and integrity of the conversion, you are advised to run such a conversion yourself and compare (and report) any discrepancies that you find.

To redo this at a later stage, you simply need to

Further Reading

It is *really* recommended, that you read Git for computer scientists and skim GitTalkDevSummit, although it's really outdated.

It really helps to understand the data structure of a git commit, because then you know how merging/rebasing works and can fix snafus easily.

A good visual git reference can be found at A Visual Git Reference.

This is a decent book on getting started with Git ($16 USD for ebook) Pragmatic Guide to Git

Implementation Details

The software used for the conversion is a slightly modified fork of svn2git, as used by the KDE project. It can be found at https://gitorious.org/~uqs/svn2git/uqs-svn2git

It requires a rules file to map svn trees and/or revisions to git branches or tags. The current rules don't make use of tags but simply store them as branches.

See the project branch at http://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/uqs/git_conv/ for extra patches, rules and the scripts used to do these conversions.