git svn info: Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree history

If you ever had to work with a clone of a git repo which was created with git-svn, you might have tried to run

git svn info .

to find out about the latest svn revision in the git tree. Instead, you will see the error message

Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree history

and you might scratch your head. Turns out that git svn info only works for local trees created with git-svn. Once you clone such a tree, all svn related metadata will be lost. This data loss is by design. Apparently git considers svn info to be “metadata” which will not be cloned, whereas git history is not “metadata” and will thus be cloned. Is is also apparently fairly well known among git developers and advanced users that git svn only works from the repository it is initialized from, but the documentation doesn’t mention this limitation anywhere AFAICS. Similar issues exist for git svn log.

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