On one of my project, we have a SVN repo but since I prefer using Git, I’m using git-svn.

Git-svn has been great, it let me create my own local branches for each new set of features (that’s when I don’t forget to create a branch) and to commit all the changes back to svn.

The problem today happened after I did a simple git-svn rebase. I had some sort of error and my local repo looked like it got reverted to the head of the svn repo….

error: patch failed: trunk/app/models/view.rb:1
error: trunk/app/models/view.rb: patch does not apply
[blah blah]
sing index info to reconstruct a base tree...
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...

I hadn’t committed to SVN for 24 hours and had a lot of work that was just checked in locally… You can imagine the panic. Rob started digging in the .git repo to finally find the hash representing the latest delta before the rebase. With the help of the #caboose guys, I did a simple

git reset --hard hash-name

Which restore my repo to the pre SVN commit state. Awesome… however I still had issues to commit my stuff. After a little while I as able to commit again, worked a bit more and tried to commit again…. same error

But this time I noticed I could simply do

git rebase --abort

to restore the original branch.an

But I still couldn’t commit properly… until I discovered that I just needed to fix the conflicts manually using

git-mergetool

git-mergetool uses whichever merge tool available: kdiff3 tkdiff xxdiff meld gvimdiff opendiff emerge vimdiff filemerge

I fixed my conflicts in no time, then did a

git rebase --continue

and finally

git-svn dcommit

Looking back, I wish I knew how to properly deal with conflicts when using git-svn, I wasted a bit of my precious time hopefully this post will help you.

p.s: here is an interesting use of Sake to handle git-svn