There’s a really helpful guide published by Atlasssian: Migrate to Git from SVN which lists five steps:

  1. Prepare your environment for the migration.
  2. Convert the SVN repository to a local Git repository.
  3. Synchronize the local Git repository when the SVN repository changes.
  4. Share the Git repository with your developers via Bitbucket Github.
  5. Migrate your development efforts from SVN to Git.

Starting the steps:

$ cp ~/Downloads/svn-migration-scripts.jar ~/
$ cd
$ java -jar ~/svn-migration-scripts.jar verify
$ java -jar ~/svn-migration-scripts.jar create-disk-image 5 GitMigration
$ cd GitMigration
$ java -jar ~/svn-migration-scripts.jar authors "svn://path-to-SVN-respository"  > authors.txt
# the above command generates authors.txt, which then needs editing.

Then I hit problems following the Atlasssian: Migrate to Git from SVN. The hint of the solution was found here. I ended-up splitting the git svn clone into git svn init followed be editing the .git/config file then followed by git svn fetch.

For example to import history from SVN I ran:

$ cd GitMigration
$ git svn init --trunk="/folder/within/repository" "svn://path-to-SVN-respository" GitRepositoryName

then edited GitRepositoryName/.git/config to read:

[core]
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    filemode = true
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
    precomposeunicode = true
[svn-remote "svn"]
    url = svn://path-to-SVN-respository
    fetch = folder/within/repository:refs/remotes/origin/trunk
    branches = ""
    tags = ""
[svn]
    authorsfile = /Users/nickager/GitMigration/authors.txt

The main additions to the auto generated config are the lines:

    branches = ""
    tags = ""
[svn]
    authorsfile = /Users/nickager/GitMigration/authors.txt

… as various trials failed to import SVN branches successfully.

then import the SVN history into Git with git svn fetch:

$ cd GitRepositoryName
$ git svn fetch

then add a remote and push to the git repository (the repository has to have been created on GitHub before taking this step):

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/gituser/gitrespository.git
$ git push origin master

Finally before the big switch to Git, while people are still checking into SVN, keep the Git repository in sync with changes in SVN with a bash script to update Github from SVN every 20minutes:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
	 echo "*** updating iOS"
	 cd /Volumes/GitMigration/GitRepositoryName
	 git svn fetch
	 git svn rebase
	 git push origin master
	 echo "*** sleeping for 20minutes"
	 sleep 1200
done