Re: [PATCH] git-svn: allow disabling expensive broken symlink checks

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> writes:

> Since dbc6c74d0858d77e61e092a48d467e725211f8e9, git-svn has had
> an expensive check for broken symlinks that exist in some
> repositories.  This leads to a heavy performance hit on
> repositories with many empty blobs that are not supposed to be
> symlinks.
>
> The workaround is enabled by default; and may be disabled via:
>
>   git config svn.brokenSymlinkWorkaround false
>
> Reported by Markus Heidelberg.
>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>

How common is this breakage in people's subversion repositories that
dbc6c74d (git-svn: handle empty files marked as symlinks in SVN,
2009-01-11) works around?

What's the way to recover from a broken import, when the subversion
repository does have such a breakage, and the user used git-svn that
predates dbc6c74?  Is it very involved, and it is much better to have the
safety by default than to force everybody else who interacts with
non-broken subversion repository suffer from this performance penalty?

Because the fix (that is broken from the performance angle) is relatively
recent, I am wondering if it makes more sense to turn it off by default,
and allow people with such a broken history to optionally turn it on.