I searched related questions but I couldn't find anything matching my specific situation: I have some old repository archives from an SVN server that was taken down years ago. They're tarballs of the original repository structure on the server. What I want to do is convert them to git repositories as a basis for future work/reviving the projects. I've already read several tutorials about the conversion process, and I think I can figure out the authors conversion, branches mapping, etc., but they all assume you have an SVN server and a url for the repository. Do I need to install and setup and SVN server to do this conversion, or is there some way I can point either git clone or svn2git (or another tool) at the repo dump I have?
install subversion locally in order to import your dump, then with git-svn package.
You can use git svn clone file:///path/to/svn/repo /path/to/empty/dir