This short post is intended to serve as a warning about a potential gotcha with git-svn, and how to prevent it.

An Anecdote

First, a sort of “postmortem” of my run-in with this issue:

I was working to migrate an old SVN repository full of documents to Git. We had decided that we didn’t need to maintain a complete history going forward, that we would just take what was currently there and put it in a new Git repository. We would keep the old SVN repository around for reference in case we ever did need to go back through that older history. We wanted to preserve the old history in SVN, but make a clean break from it for a fresh start with a new Git repo.

I used SVN to check out a fresh copy of the repo, removed .svn, turned the directory into a Git repo, and pushed it out to the new remote. All good there.

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