I had a similar task to do, but it contained some aspects that were not sufficiently covered by the other answers here:
- I wanted to convert all (in my case: two, or in general: more than one) branches of my repo.
- I had non-ASCII and (being a Windows user) non-UTF8-encoded characters (for the curious: German umlaute) in my commit messages and file names.
I did not try fast-export and hg-fast-export, since they require that you have Python and some Mercurial Python modules on your machine, which I didn't have.
I did try hg-init with TortoiseHG, and this answer gave me a good start. But it looked like it only converts the current branch, not all at once (*). So I read the hg-init docs and this blog post and added
[git]
branch_bookmark_suffix=_bookmark
to my mercurial.ini, and did
hg bookmarks -r default master
hg bookmarks -r my_branch my_branch_bookmark
hg gexport
(Repeat the 2nd line for every branch you want to convert, and repeat it again if you should happen to do another commit before executing the 3rd line). This creates a folder git within .hg, which turns out to be a bare Git repo with all the exported branches. I could clone this repo and had a working copy as desired.
Or almost...
Running
git status
on my working copy showed all files with non-ASCII characters in their names as untracked files. So I continued researching and followed this advice:
git rm -rf --cached \*
git add --all
git commit
And finally the repo was ready to be pushed up to Bitbucket :-)
I also tried the Github importer as mentioned in this answer. I used Bitbucket as the source system, and Github did quite a good job, i.e. it converted all branches automatically. However, it showed '?'-characters for all non-ASCII characters in my commit messages (Web-UI and locally) and filenames (Web-UI only), and while I could fix the filenames as described above, I had no idea what to do with the commit messages, and so I'd prefer the hg-init approach. Without the encoding issue the Github importer would have been a perfect and fast solution (as long as you have a paid Github account or can tolerate that your repo is public for as long as it takes to pull it from Github to your local machine).
(*) So it looked like before I discovered that I have to bookmark all the branches I want to export. If you do and push to a bare (!) repo, like the linked answer says, you get all the branches.
