Re: git svn's performance on cloning mono's branches/tags...

[Hin-Tak Leung <hintak.leung@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 6:15 AM, Andreas Ericsson<ae@op5.se> wrote:
> Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
>>
>> (I'm not on list so please CC) - I am trying to git svn clone mono's
>> repository, and for some strange reason it is doing a complete check
>> out from revision 1 all the way to each branch/tag . Is this normal or
>> am I doing anything wrong? I have git svn clone a few other things
>> recently (R, ghostscript) and I don't remember git doing this, but R
>> is quite a normal svn layout and I think I only have ghostcript trunk
>> (no branch/tag).
>>
>> What I did was this: I started out with just git-svn clone trunk
>> (which generated the first two [now-commented out] lines), then I
>> thought I also want 2.4 branch so I added the next commented-out
>> section, and ran 'git svn fetch --all'. Then I thought I like the
>> whole thing - so I commented out most of it and added the 4 lines as
>> blow - which is also my current git config.
>>
>> The problem is that it seems to treat every tag as a branch,
>
> This is normal. SVN makes no real distinction between tags and branches,
> so git-svn has no way of detecting which is which. SVN also allows
> committing to "tags", so it doesn't make sense for git to store what
> SVN calls tags as git tags.
>
> As for your other questions, I don't know.
>
> --
> Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
> OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
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>
> Considering the successes of the wars on alcohol, poverty, drugs and
> terror, I think we should give some serious thought to declaring war
> on peace.
>

I guess my question is two-fold:
1) what is the correct/recommended way of adding tags/branches *after*
already cloning trunk?

2) the current way of cloning svn repository is quite inefficient -
for every tag/branch, it does:
r1 -> rX branch 1
r1 -> rN tag 1
r1 -> rY branch 2
r1 -> rM tag 2
r1 -> rZ branch 3
etc

but I think it is possible to track branches to the point where it
branches off (when 'svn copy' happens), rather than all the way to r1?
And in that sense tags are just very short branches.

The current behavior is quite bandwith consuming for projects with a
long history and lots of tags, like mono...

Hin-Tak