Now that I'm a fully-committed git user, I now find myself using the git svn clone command fairly often. One problem with this command is how the authors are translated: Subversion uses simple usernames for the author-ids, whereas git uses full email address lines. You can supply an 'authors file' for git to use to look up author email addresses, but for large projects on Sourceforge that just becomes unwieldy.

Luckily, recent versions of git-svn support the --authors-prog argument, which allows you to specify a program to use for the lookup process instead of an authors file. With the right authors-prog, you can have git-svn automatically look up the name and email address for a given Sourceforge user id. And that's exactly what this bash script I wrote does.

If you want to make sure the program is used for future fetches from svn, then set svn.authorsprog to point to the location of sf2email:

git config svn.authorsprog ~/bin/sf2email