vault2git

Purpose

	Convert history from Vault repo into Git repo

Building

	1. Download Vault Client API for your version of Vault (you have to use version matching your Vault server);
	   other option is to copy *.dll from Vault client installation
	2. Replace Vault2GitLib/libs/*.dll with your files
	3. Recompile

Setting up (simple way)

	0. Install Git (msysgit is the easiest way); Configure it (email, name etc)
	1. Create empty folder and init Git repo in it. This is your Git repo and Vault working folder.
	2. Place .gitignore into your working folder. The one from vault2git may be a good starting point.
	3. Create initial commit, e.g. git commit --allow-empty --message="initial commit"
	4. Create branches from initial commit
	5. Change .config file to match your setup.
	6. run vault2git.exe.

How it works

	1. vault2git gets changesets from Vault into working folder one by one and commits each into Git. Vault bindings are stripped from
           *.sln, *.csproj, *.vdproj files.
	2. Commit message is taken from Vault. Info about Vault revision and paths are appended to the commit message:
           [git-vault-id] VaultRepo$/VaultPath@VaultRevision/VaultTrxNumber
	3. Dates of the files are not preserved.
	4. Commit dates are preserved
	5. Author names are preserved and company domain (from .config) is appended.
	6. Empty commits are converted too
	7. Git tags are generated from Vault labels. Each label is prefixed with Vault Transaction ID. Duplicates (e.g. coming from Shared
	         folder) are ignored. Use '--ignore-labels' argument to disable this functionality.

Incremental updates

	When ran again, vault2git first checks for [git-vault-id] tag in latest git commit, parses revision number (after @)
	and pulls Vault data above found number only.

Additional actions

	Every 200 git commits, Git garbage collection is executed.

	After processing is complete, finalization executes git update-server-info, which updates data in Git repo for
	dumb server (e.g. read-only http sharing with iis)

Invalid emails

	If the vault user + domain does not map to the correct email address or desired name, use .mailmap to fix it up.   See git --help shortlog for more information

Vault labels conversion

	Vault labels support a lot more characters than git tags. For compatibility, all non alphanumeric characters for
	git tags are replaced with "_". Git tag can only be created if the related git commit exists. Vault labels
	comments are added as git tag comments.
	
	Vault labels do not map to Git very well so all labels need to be reviewed if they are used for any significant
	work like marking a set of released code. It should be possible to branch at the appropriate place in Git, pull 
	the label out of Vault and then commit the changes into Git. A simple method would be to branch all labels off the 
	root of master and commit them there. At least it will be recorded truly.

	Duplicate tag errors are usually caused by a label being moved on 2 or more files.

Last Updated: 2013-06-13
Author: Andrey Nikiforov, Rob Goodridge

Contributor: Jevgeni Zelenkov ( github.com/jzelenkov )
Location: github.com/AndreyNikiforov/vault2git