For several years I had a Subversion repository named cs_misc, where I accumulated various pieces of code that didn’t need a repository of their own. A year ago, I decided to switch to Git, and created a repository named cs-misc. As described in Importing Subversion repositories to Git, I migrated cs_misc from Subversion to Git, and now I wanted to merge the two repositories (cs-misc and cs_misc). Having used git remote and git push with Github, I figured I’d try a similar approach, and this worked:

cd ~/src/cs_misc
git remote add integrate ~/src/cs-misc
git pull --allow-unrelated-histories integrate master
git remote rm integrate

Two things struck me about this:

  1. It was so easy and intuitive. OK, it wouldn’t have been intuitive if I hadn’t used git remote before, but that’s a fairly basic Git operation.

  2. This didn’t just import the current version of each file from cs-misc, it imported the entire history. I have no idea how to do that in Subversion, except for the obvious: check out each revision from repository A, and commit it to repository B. I’m not saying it can’t be done with Subversion, and it may actually be easy; I’m saying that, after five years of using Subversion, I have no idea where to begin.

The more I use Git, the happier I am to be using it instead of Subversion.