git-svn feature request: exclude certain subpaths on clone

Hi,

Consider the following example layout:

trunk/src trunk/big_fat_binary_blobs trunk/doc

I think it would be really nice to be able to tell git-svn to ignore 'big_fat_binary_blobs' while keeping 'src' and 'doc'.

I know someone is thinking, "Why did you check in 'big_fat_binary_blobs' in the first place?" In this case, the repository is out of my control. For the svn users, it's not that big of a deal since they only get one HEAD version of the binary_blobs. But when trying to clone with git-svn, I repeatedly get out of memory and packing errors (every 1000 commits) when packing several revisions of these binary_blobs. (Now, that may be a bug in of itself... which can reproduced by creating an svn repo with several revisions of KNOPPIX at the same path, followed by a git svn clone )

Anyway, I still think it may be useful to be able to ignore certain paths on a clone. In thinking about the implementation details, I figure probably the best approach would be to manually purge the unwanted path after it has been fetched, but before it is committed. That way, if a commit contains changes in paths that are both wanted and unwanted, the commit could be 'pruned'.

I've looked at the git-svn script a little, but wanted to solicit feedback and ideas before continuing further.

Thoughts?

Wade