Work-around for failing “git svn clone” (requiring full history)

I ran into this problem when I had identically-named subdirectories within branches or tags.

For example, I had tags candidates/1.0.0 and releases/1.0.0, and this caused the documented error because subdirectory 1.0.0 appears within both candidates and releases.

Per git-svn docs:

When using multiple –branches or –tags, git svn does not automatically handle name collisions (for example, if two branches from different paths have the same name, or if a branch and a tag have the same name). In these cases, use init to set up your Git repository then, before your first fetch, edit the $GIT_DIR/config file so that the branches and tags are associated with different name spaces.

So while the following command failed due to similarly named candidates and releases tags:

git svn clone --authors-file=../authors.txt --no-metadata \
    --trunk=/trunk --branches=/branches --tags=/candidates \
    --tags=/releases --tags=/tags -r 100:HEAD \
    --prefix=origin/ \
    svn://example.com:3692/my-repos/path/to/project/

the following sequence of commands did work:

git svn init --no-metadata \
    --trunk=/trunk --branches=/branches --tags=/tags \
    --prefix=origin/ \
    'svn://example.com:3692/my-repos/path/to/project/'

git config --add svn-remote.svn.tags \
    'path/to/project/candidates/*:refs/remotes/origin/tags/Candidates/*'

git config --add svn-remote.svn.tags \
    'path/to/project/releases/*:refs/remotes/origin/tags/Releases/*'

git svn fetch --authors-file=../authors.txt -r100:HEAD

Note that this only worked because there were no other conflicts within branches and tags. If there were, I would have had to resolve them similarly.

After successfully cloning the SVN repository, I then executed the following steps in order to: turn SVN tags into GIT tags; turn trunk into master; turn other references into branches; and relocate remote paths:

# Make tags into true tags
cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin/tags/* .git/refs/tags/
rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin/tags

# Make other references into branches
cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin/* .git/refs/heads/
rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes/origin
cp -Rf .git/refs/remotes/* .git/refs/heads/ # May be missing; that's okay
rm -Rf .git/refs/remotes

# Change 'trunk' to 'master'
git checkout trunk
git branch -d master
git branch -m trunk master