Git svn clone: How to defer fetch of revision history

Question

I often have the case that I want to work on a SVN repository right away. But an ordinary git svn clone [url] also clones the entire history. So I want to speed

Answer 1

None of the suggested answers will work. git svn fetch with a revision will only retrieve newer revisions than what is already cloned. You may be able to use git svn reset to go back to an older revision and retrieve from there, but you'll have to do some dirty work afterwards to 'graft' your newer revisions back onto the full tree (the SHA1 of an SVN revision in git depends on the entire parentage of the revision). If you're handy with the scalpels git offers you, go for it.

It's much easier to just avoid the issue.

• Do an initial clone of the last few revisions, so you can get working immediately;
• Start another clone of the full history into another directory/git repository;
• Work in your partial history as much as you want;
• When the full clone completes, use an approach like http://www.sanityinc.com/articles/relocating-git-svn-repositories/ to copy your work from the partial repository to the full one.

So, that's a partial answer - how can you afterwards fetch history? Fetch it into another repo and copy what you need over. Can it be done in chunks of 1000 in reverse order? With the scalpels, and a lot of patience, it could, but it's unlikely worth it. The full fetch running forward is going to outrun the overhead of all those first revisions grabbed by each block you git svn fetch, and the fixup will get tedious.