Efficient cloning from svn (with multiple branches/tags subdirs)

[Bruno Harbulot <Bruno.Harbulot@manchester.ac.uk>]

Hello,

I'm trying to clone an existing subversion repository (Restlet: 
http://restlet.tigris.org/source/browse/). I'm using Git 1.6.5. The 
layout of the project is like this:
   trunk/
   branches/1.0
   branches/1.1
   tags/1.0/1.0b1
   tags/1.0/1.0b2
   ...
   tags/1.0/1.0.1
   ...
   tags/1.1/1.1.0
   tags/1.1/1.1.1
   ...

Therefore, I've tried to use this (with and without '-T trunk', but 
that's a separate problem):

   git init
   git svn init --prefix=svn/ -t tags/1.0 -t tags/1.1 -t tags/1.2 -t 
tags/2.0 -b branches/1.0 -b branches/1.1 
http://restlet.tigris.org/svn/restlet
   git svn fetch


This takes a while (I've had to interrupt this) and this creates a 
number of branches such as:
   remotes/svn/tags/1.0b1
   remotes/svn/tags/1.0b2
   remotes/svn/tags/1.0b3
   remotes/svn/tags/1.0b3@1883
   remotes/svn/tags/1.0b3@323


What surprises me is that it looks like it's looping over and over, 
since sometimes it starts back from SVN revision 1 when it's trying to 
import a new tag.

Tt starts like this:
> 
> Checked through r101
> Checked through r201
> Checked through r301
>       A       www/index.html
> r1 = 2ec77afc2e491e2b7c825cb685101e3bcbe7a8f7 (refs/remotes/svn/tags/1.0b1@312)
>         A       source/impl/License.txt
>         A       source/impl/Copyright.txt
>         A       source/impl/org/restlet/UniformInterface.java
>         A       source/impl/org/restlet/RestletException.java
> ...

Then, when it reaches r312, it starts again at r1:

> r312 = 5b40558b5bb2b4b04f9520f89b699ff6b0f50cdb (refs/remotes/svn/tags/1.0b1@312)
> r313 = 7ebcbd9da535cfdc23aacb612271e625445a7516 (refs/remotes/svn/tags/1.0b1@1881)
> r1882 = aed1582d4868a1be8ae8fcc0f15546822099f339 (refs/remotes/svn/tags/1.0b1)
> Checked through r101
> Checked through r201
> Checked through r301
>       A       www/index.html
> r1 = 2ec77afc2e491e2b7c825cb685101e3bcbe7a8f7 (refs/remotes/svn/tags/1.0b2@321)
>         A       source/impl/License.txt
>         A       source/impl/Copyright.txt
>         A       source/impl/org/restlet/UniformInterface.java
>         A       source/impl/org/restlet/RestletException.java
>         A       source/impl/org/restlet/AbstractRestlet.java
>         A       source/impl/org/restlet/connector/Resolver.java

(And so on for each tag).

This seems particularly inefficient and unfriendly for the resource 
provider (I stopped as soon as I noticed). Is there a better way to do this?


Best wishes,

Bruno.