Following the advice of this tutorial, I cloned an svn repository which did not have the standard layout.
git-svn clone -s http://example.com/my_subversion_repo local_dir
The -s is there to signify that my Subversion repository has a standard layout (trunk/, branches/, and tags/.) If your repository doesn’t have a standard layout, you can leave that off.
Being completely new to git, I did not realize that simply leaving off the -s option without supplementing the --trunk, --branches, and --tags options would leave me not only with a branchless repository but also with the entire head of the repository checked out (instead of just the head of the trunk).
Is there a way to "fix" my local git repository to behave as though I had created it with knowledge of the svn repository layout? Can I use git-svn init to reinitialize my repository? Because of the length of time involved, I'm hoping to avoid having to reclone from scratch.