why git-svn should search aggressively for old history?

git, git-svn, svn

Solution

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 <normalperson@yhbt.net>
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 <normalperson@yhbt.net>
    Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

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.

Problem

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 ```

Original source