Git format-patch to be svn compatible?

Question

Is there any way to get a patch created with git format-patch to be svn compatible so that I can submit it to an svn repo?

I\'m working off an svn repo on github and

Answer 1

Here's a helper script for making a diff against the the latest svn changeset and the given commit: http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@trafficserver.apache.org/msg00864.html

#!/bin/sh
#
# git-svn-diff
# Generate an SVN-compatible diff against the tip of the tracking branch
TRACKING_BRANCH=`git config --get svn-remote.svn.fetch | sed -e 's/.*:refs\/remotes\///'`
REV=`git svn find-rev $(git rev-list --date-order --max-count=1 $TRACKING_BRANCH)`
git diff --no-prefix $(git rev-list --date-order --max-count=1 $TRACKING_BRANCH) $* |
sed -e "s/^+++ .*/&    (working copy)/" -e "s/^--- .*/&    (revision $REV)/" \
-e "s/^diff --git [^[:space:]]*/Index:/" \
-e "s/^index.*/===================================================================/"

Answer 2

It is indeed a feature request early 2008

Linus Torvalds said at the time:

So I would argue that you need something stronger to say "don't do a git diff", and that should also disallow rename detection at a minimum.
Quite frankly, any program that is so stupid as to not accept current git patches (ie TortoiseSVN), then we damn well shouldn't just disable the most trivial part of it. We should make sure that we do not enable any of the rather important extensions:
even if ToirtoiseSVN would ignore them, if ignoring them means that it mis-understands the diff, it shouldn't be allowed at all.

That may be why

 git-format-patch: add --no-binary to omit binary changes in the patch.

has been introduced in Git1.5.6 in May/July 2008 (I have not tested it though)

Answer 3

The short answer is patch -p1 -i {patch.file}.

Please refer to this blog for details: Creating Subversion patches with git.

Answer 4

SVN probably cannot understand the output of git diff -p, but you can resort to brute force:

1. Make two clones of your repo
2. In one clone check out your latest stuff
3. In the other clone checkout whatever is equivalent to the svn upstream. If you have planned ahead you have a copy of svn upstream on its own branch, or you have tagged the last svn version. If you have not planned ahead, use the date or gitk to find the git SHA1 hash that most closely approximates the svn state.
4. Now compute a real patch by running diff -r over the two clones.

Answer 5

The accepted answer provided by Nicholas works fine, except when a) binary files exist in the diff or b) you are working in windows Git and have directories with spaces. To get that resolved I had to add a nested git diff command to ignore binaries and sed command to escape the spaces. It's a bit cumbersome to write, so I created an alias:

[alias]
svnpatch = "!f() { git diff --name-only --no-prefix master...$1 | grep -Ev \"\\.sdf|\\.Doc|\\.dll|\\.zip|\\.exe\" | sed 's_\\s_\\\\\\\\ _g'  | xargs git diff --no-prefix master...$1 > $1.patch; echo "Created $1.patch"; }; f"

If you then type:

git svnpatch Feature123

...a patch file Feature123.patch will be created with the differences between the merge base of branch master and branch Feature123.

Answer 6

Subversion < 1.6 doesn't have patch support. It looks like Subversion 1.7 will allow applying patches and the git/hg extensions to unified diff are on our TODO list.