Re: Stopping git-svn pulling a particular branch

[Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com> wrote:
> G'day
>
> An svn developer created a branch from a subdirectory of the trunk
> rather than by copying trunk itself.
>
> I want to avoid pulling this branch into my git repo with git svn
> fetch because the re-rooting pulls in too much history and content
> that I don't want.
>
> Is there any easy way to achieve this? I tried used the --ignore-paths
> option, but this doesn't seem suited to the purpose.
>
> I can delete the SVN branch if that will help, but past experience
> suggests that it won't.
>

Answering my own question. There is an undocumented option to git-svn
--ignore-refs which can be used to achieve this.

I found that I had to manually delete the directories corresponding to
the bogus branches from .git/svn/refs/remotes, then re-run git svn
fetch with the --ignore-refs option set to a regex that matched the
bogus branches.

This allowed me to fetch everything else I needed to fetch and
advanced the maxRevs metadata in .git/svn/.metadata past the
problematic  branches so that subsequent svn fetch calls avoided the
attempts to fetch the bogus branches.

I'll draft a documentation patch when I get a chance...

jon.