In our project we had to move several files between git repositories. Having searched the internet, there didn't seem to be any well defined way to do it. I don't claim to be a git wizard, but I came up with a solution that I wanted to share in case it was useful to anyone else.
There is a method to filter a folder in a git repository which can then be used to move between repositories, but not so easily for files. I came up with a method that effectively involves rewriting the history to put everything into a folder which we then steal.
As we are using filter-branch we first need to take a clone of the source repository. Filter-branch is a destructive command that actually edits the history and will destroy your repository.
#!/usr/bin/python
import os
files = ["service-availability-checker.cpp",
"service-availability-checker.h"]
for filename in files:
if not os.access("keep", os.R_OK):
os.mkdir("keep")
if os.access(filename, os.R_OK):
os.rename(filename, "keep/"+filename)
move-files.py
git filter-branch --tree-filter /path/to/move-files.py
Now we can grab the folder we wanted
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter keep/
Now we turn the directory into a set of patches
git format-patch HEAD^ HEAD
This gives us a nice set of patch files which contain commit information which can be imported into a new repository.