this is the workflow I currently use for my svn projects (I never use svn branches, and some projects are actively worked on by other people as well):
Unfortunately, svn's externals are quite flexible. I've run across a number of scripts that treat them as
To answer your second subquestion: no. 'git svn fetch' needs to operate on a subtree of Subversion's repo, but it needs to be something it can treat like a branch. The only thing map well into that paradigm is a directory (trunk/, for example). FWIW, Bazaar and Mercurial suffer here too. At the end of the day, Subversion is just a versioned file system, whereas Git has a first class concept of a branch. This is one of those mismatches getting in the way. :-(