Can I do 'git svn dcommit' from a SVN git clone which was created with --no-metadata?

Question

I converted a SVN repository to git using

git svn clone --stdlayout --authors-file=authors.txt --no-metadata svn://svn.foo.com

For some reason, this gave me what looked like a bare repository. There was just a .git directory. In thise cloned repository, I wanted to get a checkout. Since git checkout didn't work, I ran

git reset --hard

Is this the correct way? It seems to work, but sounds scary. I then attempted to run

git svn rebase

So that the latest changes from the Subversion repository are pulled into my git clone. However, this didn't work. Instead, it yields the message

Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree history

Does anybody know why this is happening?

Answer 1

I believe this happens because I passed --no-metadata to git svn clone. This is what the git-svn(1) man page says about the 'no metadata' option:

This gets rid of the git-svn-id: lines at the end of every commit.

If you lose your .git/svn/git-svn/.rev_db file, git svn will not be able to rebuild it and you won't be able to fetch again, either. This is fine for one-shot imports.

I didn't read it like that, but apparently using --no-metadata made git svn not generate the git-svn/.rev_db file. I do have a .git/svn subdirectory, but no git-svn below that.