import-tfs.asc

TFS

If your team is converting their source control from TFVC to Git, you’ll want the highest-fidelity conversion you can get. This means that, while we covered both git-tfs and git-tf for the interop section, we’ll only be covering git-tfs for this part, because git-tfs supports branches, and this is prohibitively difficult using git-tf.

Note	This is a one-way conversion. The resulting Git repository won’t be able to connect with the original TFVC project.

The first thing to do is map usernames. TFVC is fairly liberal with what goes into the author field for changesets, but Git wants a human-readable name and email address. You can get this information from the tf command-line client, like so:

PS> tf history $/myproject -recursive > AUTHORS_TMP

This grabs all of the changesets in the history of the project and put it in the AUTHORS_TMP file that we will process to extract the data of the 'User' column (the 2nd one). Open the file and find at which characters start and end the column and replace, in the following command-line, the parameters 11-20 of the cut command with the ones found:

PS> cat AUTHORS_TMP | cut -b 11-20 | tail -n+3 | uniq | sort > AUTHORS

The cut command keeps only the characters between 11 and 20 from each line. The tail command skips the first two lines, which are field headers and ASCII-art underlines. The result of all of this is piped to uniq to eliminate duplicates, and saved to a file named AUTHORS. The next step is manual; in order for git-tfs to make effective use of this file, each line must be in this format:

DOMAIN\username = User Name <[email protected]>

The portion on the left is the ``User'' field from TFVC, and the portion on the right side of the equals sign is the user name that will be used for Git commits.

Once you have this file, the next thing to do is make a full clone of the TFVC project you’re interested in:

PS> git tfs clone --with-branches --authors=AUTHORS https://username.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection $/project/Trunk project_git

Next you’ll want to clean the git-tfs-id sections from the bottom of the commit messages. The following command will do that:

PS> git filter-branch -f --msg-filter 'sed "s/^git-tfs-id:.*$//g"' -- --all

That uses the sed command from the Git-bash environment to replace any line starting with ``git-tfs-id:'' with emptiness, which Git will then ignore.

Once that’s all done, you’re ready to add a new remote, push all your branches up, and have your team start working from Git.