Converting Bazaar Repositories to Git

I have enjoyed using Bazaar. Its flexibility is tremendous. I've always used whatever SCM system I was using from the command-line and avoided turning on integration in the IDE since it seemed to cause more problems for very little benefit.

However, after watching some of the Xcode 4.0 WWDC videos, I've realized the writing is on the wall. Xcode integration of svn and git will now provide useful benefits. I also realize that as the third most popular DVCS, Bazaar is unlikely to ever see support in Xcode.

So, with that in mind, I've decided to switch from Bazaar to Git (unless something goes horribly wrong).

The positive news is that so far, the conversion has been about as painless as it could possibly be. Certainly far more painless than the conversion from CVS to Bazaar.

To convert from Bazaar to Git involved the following steps:

1) Install the Bazaar fastimport module

2) Install git

3) Create a git repository into which to convert

git init git.repo - (use --bare if it's going to be on a central server)

cd git.repo


4) Run a command to export the bazaar repository, piping the result to a command to import into git

In this example:

~/bzr_repo - the bazaar repository to convert

~/git.repo - the new git repository


(command is being run from the git.repo directory)

bzr fast-export --export-marks=../marks.bzr ../bzr_repo/ | git fast-import --export-marks=../marks.git

That's it. You're now done. You can now clone that repository and go to work.