You've already discovered the simplest way to specify a shallow clone in Git-SVN, by specifying the SVN revision number that you want to start your clone at ( -r$REV:HEAD
).
For example: git svn clone -s -r1450:HEAD some/svn/repo
Git's data structure is based on pointers in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which makes it trivial to walk back n
commits. But in SVN ( and therefore in Git-SVN) you will have to find the revision number yourself.