We’re changing our modularized application at work from building and deploying with Ant to Maven. The requirements to that process is:

• my colleagues can go on working without being involved in that task
• not loosing any svn history
• merge the whole task at once into trunk

The plan looks like this:

1. create a branch in source control
2. create new directories in src the maven standard src/main/java and add it to source control
3. move all source files src/* to src/main/java/ and src/main/resources/ with source control not to lose any history
4. create the pom.xml
5. merge changes from colleagues to my branch
6. at the end, merge my branch back to trunk

I wanted to be sure that I won’t have any disaster with the last steps to merge stuff together. I read about the weekness of svn in merging branches. And indeed, I tried it and run into merge problems.

So, what was needed is that I had to merge each module manually. Please!?!?

svn merge http://server/branch/module1/src/com src/main/java/
svn merge http://server/branch/module1/src/ src/main/resource/
svn merge http://server/branch/module1/test/com src/test/java/
svn merge http://server/branch/module1/src/ src/main/resource/
...

So I came up with the solution to use git on the client site. I got the code from the svn repository, which I kept synchronized with git master:

git svn clone file:///some/repo -T trunk -b branches -t tags

I did my work on a git branch and got the changes from my colleagues on git master once in a while. At the end I merge git branch with git master and with svn trunk. Gotya!