How to create a git clone with branches of a "subproject"?

Question

Here's the situation: We've got a huge svn repository, which is the "master" (can't change this because it's actually "owned" by another company). We would prefer to work locally in git to get the branching flexibility and speed that git offers. But we don't want to clone the whole repository.

The repository structure looks roughly like this:

/trunk/project1/*
      /project2/*
/branches/branch/project1/*
                /project2/*
/tags/tag1/tag1a/project1/*
          /tag1b/project1/*
     /tag2/tag2a/project2/*

I'm only interested in project1, but I would like to have both trunk and branches (tags are not so important, but it would be nice to get them, too).

I'm able to get a single branch cloned with these svn-remote settings:

[svn-remote "svn"]
    url = https://svn.company.com/svn/branches/branch1/project1

but I really want to get the branching structure, too. I have thought about using ignore-paths:

[svn-remote "svn"]
    ignore-paths=^project2|^project3|...

but I would have to update the ignore-paths every time a new top-level "project" directory is added, which is not really sustainable.

Secondarily, we really need only the tags in /tags/tag1 (if we need tags at all). Any thoughts on how to do that would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I think that the following in your .git/config file should work:

[svn-remote "svn"]
  url = https://svn.company.com/svn
  trunk = trunk/project1:refs/remotes/svn/trunk
  tags = tags/*/project1:refs/remotes/svn/tags/*
  branches = branches/*/project1:refs/remotes/svn/branches/*

I based this on the configuration section of the git-svn manpage