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

[Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 2:03 AM, Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net> wrote:
> Bruno Harbulot <Bruno.Harbulot@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Yeah, that's an unfortunate thing about the flexibility of Subversion,
> basically anything can be a "tag" or a directory and it's extremely
> hard for git svn to support any uncommon cases for tags/branches
> out-of-the box, so the manual config editing is needed.

I've been thinking about this myself for some time.  One option that
might be "interesting" would be to just grab the *entire* svn tree
(from the root), and then use git-subtree[1] to slice and dice it into
branches using your local copy of git (which is fast and uses no
bandwidth) instead of during the svn fetch (which is slow and uses
lots of bandwidth).  I think it would also simplify the git-svn code
quite a lot, at least for fetching, since there would always be a
global view of the tree and SVN things like "copy branch A to tag B"
would just be exactly that.

Of course I have no time to code this up myself, so I apologize for
just dumping ideas on you without code behind them.  If this inspires
anyone, I'd be happy to help with any missing features (or
documentation) this exposes in git-subtree, though.

Have fun,

Avery

[1] http://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree