Branchname with a colon

SubGit
#1

I’m using Subgit to convert a 15 year old (32.000 revisions) project to git and it’s working brilliantly. Thank you for this tool. I’m using excludeBranches extensively to filter out mistakes made in the past
At one point someone made a branch from the root of the repository. No wonder the conversion seemed to hang on that revision.
There is one case that doesn’t work with excludeBranches. One time a branch was made with the name branches/http:/url/to/the/branchname. So the the name of the branch is http: instead of branchname. When I add excludeBranches = branches/http: to the config-file, I get the following message:
pattern should not contain ':' or ';' characters

How can I exclude this branch? Will it be picked up by adding http??

#2

Hi Lodewijk,

thank you for you for you kind words! Glad to know our tool works well)
As for the branch exclusion – I’m afar the http? will not work, excludeBranches does not support such pattern, but it’s possible to use wildcard for that:

[svn]
    …
    excludeBranches = branches/http*/url/to/the/branchname

Yet wildcard means not a single character, so it may exclude more branches.
Another possible way is to not to use excludeBranches to exclude, but explicitly list only those branches in the mapping configuration that must be imported thus excluding all the rest.

#3

I’m running the conversion right now with branches/http? and it didn’t reject it. I’ll see if you are correct in an hour or so :)

So excludeBranches can be deeper than one level. Since having the complete url of the repository as a branchname is pretty unique, I don’t think using * will be too greedy. Only listing the branches we need is not really feasable since we’ve made many branches over the last 15 years (I could script it though).

#4

It does not reject it, indeed, yet it reads ? literally.
It’s not mandatory to list every single branch in the mapping configuration, those could also be some wildcard patterns, yet not including unneeded branches.

#5

You’re right (of course). I filtered the branch with branches/http* and that worked perfectly. We haven’t followed a branch naming pattern in those 15 years, so sadly a wildcard pattern to include the branches we want is not feasible.
Thanks for your help!