git-svn feature request: exclude certain subpaths on clone

["Wade Berrier" <wberrier@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Consider the following example layout:

trunk/src
trunk/big_fat_binary_blobs
trunk/doc

I think it would be really nice to be able to tell git-svn to ignore
'big_fat_binary_blobs' while keeping 'src' and 'doc'.

I know someone is thinking, "Why did you check in
'big_fat_binary_blobs' in the first place?"  In this case, the
repository is out of my control.  For the svn users, it's not that big
of a deal since they only get one HEAD version of the binary_blobs.
But when trying to clone with git-svn, I repeatedly get out of memory
and packing errors (every 1000 commits) when packing several revisions
of these binary_blobs.  (Now, that may be a bug in of itself... which
can reproduced by creating an svn repo with several revisions of
KNOPPIX at the same path, followed by a git svn clone )

Anyway, I still think it may be useful to be able to ignore certain
paths on a clone.  In thinking about the implementation details, I
figure probably the best approach would be to manually purge the
unwanted path after it has been fetched, but before it is committed.
That way, if a commit contains changes in paths that are both wanted
and unwanted, the commit could be 'pruned'.

I've looked at the git-svn script a little, but wanted to solicit
feedback and ideas before continuing further.

Thoughts?

Wade