git-svn with less pain

How to make a svn clone with git-svn without spending 10 hours

I recently had the mixed experience of cloning the Rosegarden source from its SVN repo with git-svn.

First thing: Do not believe anyone who tells you to just launch:

git svn clone -s REPO-URL 

If somebody tells you to do that, give them a mean glare from me. It will take hours and hundreds of megabytes. I quit after a total of maybe 10 or 11 hours, after maybe a dozen restarts with no end in sight. It had used about 350 megabytes of disk, and it wasn't anywhere near finished downloading.

Second thing: You're going to have to find the latest SVN revision number by hand. At least, I found no way to do it within the git workflow¹. You can find it remotely via svn but if you wanted to use svn you wouldn't be doing this.

What worked for me is:

git svn clone -r $REV:HEAD -s $URL $DIR

where $REV is a fairly recent SVN revision number; $URL and $DIR are obvious.

At the risk of making my own post redundant, this Stackflow thread showed me how to do it.

Footnotes:

¹ I tried just initting the directory with git-svn and launching various informational git-svn commands from in it; none worked.