I use Git. I’m relatively new to the party and it’s all I’ve ever used. I tried to get SVN working for me back when I was first gettings started and it felt like hand-wiring a tube amplifier - slow, tedious, and you don’t know if it’s going to work until you’re totally done. I’ve more recently taken on a client who uses a nifty issue tracker called Jira, but they have their source checked in to SVN. I thought I was going to to have to get familiar with it until I rediscovered a tool that comes with Git called git-svn. It works pretty transparently after learning a couple of new commands.
This morning however, I tried something new and was greeted with this (after 5 hours of work).
src/sites/all/modules/eloqua
580e5a6480dfae9ee8aa39e2ff14e4b3604d8827
doesn't exist in the repository at /usr/local/git/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 4771
Failed to read object 580e5a6480dfae9ee8aa39e2ff14e4b3604d8827
at /usr/local/git/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 573
This is a Drupal site that I’m working on. To make a long story short, I decided to pull a new module over via Git from drupal.org instead of using Drush like I always do. I figured I might want to chip in on some of the development of this module while I’m already here. Everything went fine, I added the .git folder within the module to .gitignore and went on my way. After finishing up enough of the work to send it over to staging and attempting a git svn dcommit I get the horrifying error above.
I found this post that got me started down the right track. I used a different approach, though. I used the technique of rewriting the history with the info found here. I’m pretty familiar with removing accidentally committed DB passwords, and wasn’t familiar with the technique that he had commented out in that post. Worked like a charm, and am now back on track.
To sum up, you delete the offending directory and then run something to the effect of
git filter-branch --index-filter \ 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch path/to/the/formerly/misbehaving/module'
from the base path of the git repo. By the way, that backslash doesn’t do anything but allow you to wrap a command to two lines. You can leave it out if you want and just type all that as one long line.
The culprit of all this is that git-svn specifically chokes on git repos below the main one, as is the case if you git clone a module straight off of d.o. So, sorry kids, you’ll have to contribute that code in some other way.