Contributing to QGIS using git-svn

03.03.2011 20:23 ·  GIS  ·  qgis, git

At the last QGIS developer meeting in Wrocław we discussed the migration from SVN to Git. There was even a small workshop on using Git at the hackfest. The final decision on this topic has not yet been made, but it will be discussed again at the next meeting in Lisbon.

For those who want to try Git in action, there are several QGIS mirrors on GitHub (one, two) that can be used for development. Gary Sherman has written a good post on how to do this.

Another option is to use git-svn. This eliminates the need to create an account on GitHub and is a good option if you just want to try Git but still want to use your SVN working copy for a while. This is the option I chose.

First, we need to obtain sources, starting with some revision

git svn clone --revision 15000:HEAD https://svn.osgeo.org/qgis/trunk/qgis qgis

If necessary, revision 15000 can be replaced with another revision. Now you can cd into the qgis directory and use all the features of git: create local branches, make and commit changes, etc. When everything is ready to be committed back to trunk, use the following command

git svn dcommit

To synchronise with the repository, use

git svn rebase

I’ve already made my first commit this way.