Version Control – How to Move a Multi-GB SVN Repo to Git

gitversion control

Currently my company has a Visual Studio solition in an SVN repo that's organized as follows:

SolutionFolder (~3.5 GB)
|-> SolutionName.sln
|-> .. Some source code folders... (~250 MB)
|-> ThirdParty (~3 GB)
|-> Tools
    | -> Tool1
    | -> Tool2

Tool1 and Tool2 are build independently (have their own solutions), but produce executables that are used in the main build. ThirdParty folder contains all dependencies for the project, including some pre-compiled 100+ MB .lib files and large libraries like boost.

It's convenient to have it all in one SVN repo so that (1) developer has to do only one check-out, and (2) we don't need to keep track which versions of dependencies we need for each version of the build. On the flip side, it takes a while to check out this repo.

What would be the best way to move this project structure to git? Presumably it's best to exclude ThirdParty and possibly Tools from the main repo, but we'd like to keep ThirdParty easily downloadable in one step, and we like it versioned (and version mismatches between main repo and ThirdParty/Tools would be bad).

At this point I'm not interested in preserving history, just in figuring out how to organize such project.

Best Answer

Use the proper tool for the job. In Windows, that means

Use NuGet for third-party dependencies

That way, you keep the third-party dependencies in a versioned way, but you will not bloat your repository with unneeded stuff. Checkouts are much faster, and the project is organized as it should be. You can enable an option in Visual Studio so it always downloads all dependencies automatically.

Of course you can use a solution that just uses git (another repo, submodules etc), but that's just hacks. Doing it the right way will pay off quickly, and leave you with a future-proof system.

Edit after comments: The best way to use NuGet is to set up a local NuGet source, either on a shared drive, or a full nuget server. Setup shouldn't take more than a few minutes either way. That way, you can guarantee that all the packages you need are always available, no matter where they originated.

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