Carsten Wiesbaum

As I prefer Git as version control system I often end up working with it as client for Subversion (SVN) repositories. Recently, I had to interact with a SVN repository which was moved to another location after my initial cloning.

As Git stores the SVN URL and includes it into the SHA-1 hash calculation you can end up having the following problem as soon as you change the repository URL and try to push your changes to the remote repository:

Unable to determine upstream SVN information from HEAD history.
Perhaps the repository is empty. at /usr/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 519.

The problem is that by changing the SVN repository URL calculated SHA-1 hashes differ and Git cannot determine the proper commit to push to. In order to overcome these problems you can add the rewriteRoot option to your configuration file and afterwards change the URL:

git config --replace-all svn-remote.svn.rewriteRoot http://old.repository.com/url
git config --replace-all svn-remote.svn.url http://new.repository.com/url

Next time you try to push your changes they will be pushed to the new repository destination (newURL) but Git pretends it to be the old repository destination (oldURL).

Recently I wanted to migrate an existing Subversion (SVN) repository trunk to a new Git repository. Here is a short description how you can do it in four simple steps.

First of all, create a new bare repository:

$ mkdir NewGitRepo
$ cd NewGitRepo/
$ git init --bare

Secondly, checkout the old SVN repository using Git and enter the repository folder. For this post I created a sample SVN repository on my local hard drive:

$ git svn clone file:///some/file/path/OldSVNRepo/trunk ./OldSVNRepoGit
$ cd OldSVNRepoGit

Thirdly, add your new Git repository as additional remote branch to the checked out SVN repository:

 $ git remote add origin /some/file/path/NewGitRepo/

Finally, push SVN contents to new Git bare repository:

$ git push -u origin master
Counting objects: 12, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (12/12), 1016 bytes, done.
Total 12 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (12/12), done.
To /some/file/path/NewGitRepo/
 * [new branch]      master -> master
Branch master set up to track remote branch master from origin.

As stated in the heading, this is just a simple way. Additional information regarding this topic can be found in the Pro Git book by Scott Chacon:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-and-Other-Systems-Migrating-to-Git

When working on SOA projects I am used to create some developer test suites for myself in order to do some initial web service QA. For this purpose SoapUI is a commonly used functional testing tool. Depending on the project these “small” test suites can actually become quite big. That is fine as long only one service endpoint has to be tested, however most likely you end up with several endpoints for different development stages (development, integration, production). Gladly SoapUI provides a functionality to set web service endpoints for all service request. Only problem is to find this functionality 😉

To demonstrate the functionality I took a standard global weather service and created a small SoapUI project.

Within the project I created some requests and test suites for both operations. Furthermore, I added some additional endpoints to the GlobalWeatherSoap Interface. You can access this view by double clicking the respective web service interface.

In order to set the endpoint required for the next test run, you have to select it from the list and click the Assign button in the top menu. As result an additional dialogue opens which provides several options.

In this example we want to set the new endpoint for all requests and test requests, therefore this option has to be selected. Afterwards all requests point to the new endpoint and the test suite can be executed.