git svn rebase creates some commits with empty author, commiter and date fields

From: Peter Kirk <peter.kirk@gmx.de>
Date: Nov 18, 2008, 10:21 UTC
Message-ID: <200811181121.18264.peter.kirk@gmx.de>

Hi there,

I am using git version 1.6.0.3, which I compiled myself from sources on my linux/amd64 box which runns kubuntu 8.10.

Now, when I do "git svn clone" to retrieve the entire history from the svn server then everything works fine. Then I start working with this, commit some myself, and run "git svn rebase" frequently. What happens (and I don't see the pattern) is that *some* commits that are retrieved via "git svn rebase" are broken...they don't contain a valid author field, the date is at 1970 and, most importantly (for me) the commit message is empty except for the "git-svn-id:" line that "git svn" adds automatically. The diff is fine, and I can still use the checkout fine...but I cannot view the log-message/author/date of some commits, which becomes tiresome quickly. The only way to "fix" these broken commits is to do a clean "git svn clone", but as new commits are pulled via "git svn rebase", my repository will again become polluted with broken commits.

When I run "git fsck" I get a line like this for every broken commit:

error in commit 94a0eb26b0843f6b4db28d24b41301bd295d0794: invalid author/committer line

When I run git show on one of the broken commits the output looks like so:
########### snip ###########
commit 420be3a37353e3f2a968a2a8686a7169b31b9c3e
Author: (no author) <(no author)@596c1c1d-4ad6-0310-94f8-b98c4e649a3b>
Date:   Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 +0000
 
    git-svn-id: svn+ssh://hiddenhost@5681 596c1c1d-4ad6-0310-94f8-b98c4e649a3b

diff --git a/bla/foo.cpp b/bla/foo.cpp
...the correct diff output follows...
############# snap ##########

While trying to find a solution to my problem with google I stumbled accross an 
old thread from 2007, but it sounds similar to my problem so I will link it 
for reference: https://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2007/10/30/368150
Note that in that case the changesets themselves seemed to be empty though 
though, for me it is only "author+date+commit message". Also I don't 
(knowingly) have any "authors file" provided.

Thanks in advance for any help, and please ask if any info is missing,
Peter