git svn clone fails

["Jörg Schaible" <joerg.schaible@swisspost.com>]

Hello guys,

we have to turn some projects managed by Subversion into a GIT-based 
solution. However the conversion unfortunately fails with an error:

============== %< ==============
[...]
Found branch parent: (refs/remotes/origin/tags/v_2.1.1) 
450fa2c84a8fc087a2a66e5fb3d6d22096671f81
Following parent with do_switch
        M       changes.xml
        M       pom.xml
couldn't truncate file at /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/5.20.2/Git.pm line 
1325.
$ git --version
git version 2.5.0
============== %< ==============

Apart from the line number, the same error occurs also with GIT version 
2.4.6 and 2.3.6 (latest stable version in Gentoo).

The command to create the GIT repository was:
============== %< ==============
$ git svn clone http://websvn/svn/essvn/standard/java-commons/lang -s --no-
metadata --preserve-empty-dirs -A ~/tmp/authors.txt commons-lang
============== %< ==============

Note, that the command succeeds even for 2.4.6 if we drop the --preserve-
empty-dirs option - at the cost of some empty directories which are used to 
trigger profiles for Maven; i.e. without those we cannot reproduce released 
versions.

Cheers,
Jörg