Converting from Subversion to Mercurial

Sam Hart

2007-05-24 00:19:22

As I said in my last entry, I've been evaluating the various modern DVCSes to try and figure out which of them would give me the most benefit, while at the same time irritate me the least.

I've been using Subversion (SVN) for a few years now on my dev servers (formerly, svn.samhart.net and friends) and have mostly been pleased with it. In fact, the only reason I even considered replacing SVN was because there were certain aspects of DVCS that I felt could make my life easier, namely the ability to have a repo's entire history available locally and the fact that offline work can be done so much easier with them.

Additionally, I've been working with a lot of modern DVCSes lately (namely bzr, git and svk) and I've been very displeased by each of them. They all had at least one critical problem that, for me, made them impractical to even consider for use in my own repos. The end result is that I've spent a lot of time frustratingly researching and testing as many DVCSes as I could to try and figure out if I should switch or just stick with SVN.

But, after the smoke cleared and the fires died down, I discovered that one DVCS, Mercurial (Hg) was left standing on equal ground with SVN in the "has to not irritate me" department.

The problem? Conversion from SVN to Hg isn't as straightforward as one would like. Thus, I'm documenting the steps I had to do to try and help out anyone else who's attempting to go down this path.

For what it's worth, I don't plan on discussing what pro's and con's are involved with each of the DVCSes here. At the end of the day they each have comparable feature-sets and functionalities, and any choice as to which DVCS a person will use will likely be a very personal one (or at least one dictated by someone charge :-) Thus, I am not going to argue the benefits of Hg over any of the others, or even over SVN. I'm merely going to show how you can convert your existing SVN repos into Hg repos, as well as set up Hg to be allow for easy SVN-like pushes/pulls on your server.

System Information


I should mention a what I have been running, as well as what I will be running. I do this only because I know there's a myriad of ways to set up SVN and Hg, and unless you're doing what I'm doing, my notes wont help you much.

Traditionally, I ran SVN using WebDAV in Apache2.x. I wanted to continue to run Hg using Apache2.x (as this server has other needs for Apache2.x), but I no longer needed WebDAV for Hg. I'm also running Debian (with a mix of packages from stable, testing, and unstable).

Every tool that I mention in this guide can currently be found in Debain, their package names are:


Naturally, you can get these things up and running in other *nixes, but I'll leave that up to you to figure out if you decide to follow my guide.