Weird behaviour when importing from a subversion repository (empty dir/ambiguous argument)

[<HH-developing@heigl-online.at>]

Hi everybody!
I’m a software developer in lower Austria and started introducing subversion in my company some time ago. It was mainly for myself to have a history. Now when I looked for myself I came to git. 
When I’m more comfortable with it we’ll switch at company too.

So I’ve tried to clone our main project and I got an error. I have to say I cloned some other even bigger subversion projects and it worked, so something must be special here.
I hope you read this long mail, I tried to separate it in sections and tried to shorten the output a little bit.


My command:
git svn clone "[subversionrepo]"  [gitclonedir] -T trunk -b branches -t tags --username [subversionuser]



The error:
fatal: ambiguous argument 'a41f9bd5959dde85035bd047bf730cc62eaee12a^..1cb281cf44644da76ed94764f7770bb9e11d7424': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions
rev-list a41f9bd5959dde85035bd047bf730cc62eaee12a^..1cb281cf44644da76ed94764f7770bb9e11d7424: command returned error: 128
if I do the same with --no-follow-parent, it works, but I assume then I’m losing the branch/tag connection to the trunk. If I’m losing the branches I can live with it (I think I did more branching in the last days with git, then with subversion the last year ☺ ), but I’m interested and if there is a possibility I’ll prefer to import the subversion project completely.



I did some further investigation:
„git log a41f9bd5959dde85035bd047bf730cc62eaee12a“ works giving me:
    git-svn-id: [subversionrepo]/branches/Pluginstruktur-HEH@158 ebb3a944-7b90-0446-bc25-369ed2d31b3f
git log a41f9bd5959dde85035bd047bf730cc62eaee12a^ (this should be the parent, right?) says „unknown revision or path not in the working tree.“



I think it’s a failure I did in subversion some months ago:
Rev 158: Created an empty folder 'Pluginstruktur-HEH'.
Rev 159: Deleted folder ‚ Pluginstruktur-HEH‘ (don’t ask why)
Rev 160: branched from trunk to branches/Pluginstruktur-HEH

So in Rev 158 there was an empty folder in branches, in Rev 159 no folder and in Rev160 a non empty folder out oft he trunk.
Perhaps this ist the problem, because between Rev 158 and Rev159 there was a single empty folder an das I found out git doesn’t track empty folders. Perhaps that’s why Rev158 (git: a41f9bd5959dde85035bd047bf730cc62eaee12a) doesn’t have a parent here.



Maybe you can shed some led in this and how I may solve this.  Can I just leave out revision 158 and 159 when doing git svn clone, because it was nothing more than creating an empty folder and deleting an empty folder? I’ve read somewhere on the net you can also use a svndump as base for a git import, perhaps I then may leave rev 158/159 out in the dumb, but I don’t know how to use exactly an svndump as a git import and also if this wuld be a solution for me.

Thanks in advance, kind regards,
Harald