Question

I have noticed that deleted branches in svn is not preserved in git. I know that branches in git and svn is rather different in the way they are processed. However that seems to be dangerous that svn to git cloning looses some information.

Is it possible to preserve branches from svn in git that do not exists in svn HEAD revision?

Answer 1

Deleted Subversion branches should be preserved on Git; if you’re seeing them disappear, I’d expect that’s some bug with how you’re using git-svn.

You will occasionally get strange behaviour where someone deletes a branch in the Subversion repository then recreates it, but this will simply result in oddly named Git branches such as remotes/branch_name@2312, so Git can keep track of the branch before it was deleted in Subversion as well as the new branch.

That said, cloning a Subversion repository to Git does lose information. Git-svn is a tool for using Git with Subversion, it doesn’t provide a perfect one-to-one mapping between Git and Subversion. In particular, the only Subversion property that git-svn maintains is svn:executable, and it will handle certain simple cases where it sees svn:merge-info changes.