why git-svn should search aggressively for old history?

Question

Something strange happened when I ran git svn clone -s, though the following information tells us to not be alarmed, I wonder why that is kind of svn error?

Why this path does not exist, is it deleted by others?

If yes, why git svn should search aggressively for old history?

Initializing parent: refs/remotes/tags/sequentialInformationalBottleneckClusterer-1.0.1@8400
W: Ignoring error from SVN, path probably does not exist: (160013): Filesystem has no item: File not found: revision 101, path '/trunk/packages/internal/sequentialInformationalBottleneckClusterer'
W: Do not be alarmed at the above message git-svn is just searching aggressively for old history.
This may take a while on large repositories
Checked through r1501

Answer 1

This was a fun one. Do not be alarmed.

The W: signifies "warning", and all this warning tells you is that /trunk/packages/internal/sequentialInformationalBottleneckClusterer doesn't have a revision between r0 and r100 in your SVN repository. The warning was introduced in early 2008.

commit eee8a1742bf51df33f0f6004774035f57253f944
Author: Eric Wong <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Jan 7 02:40:40 2008 -0800

    git-svn: clarify the "Ignoring error from SVN" piece

    I've heard of several users puzzled by this, and it sometimes it
    appears as if git-svn is doing nothing on slower connections and
    larger repositories.

    Signed-off-by: Eric Wong <[email protected]>
    Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>

You can read the original thread here if you're interested. In the meantime, just ignore the warning. The subroutine in question, skip_unknown_revs (warning, this link will age if the file in github changes) would kill the process if it caught an unexpected error.