What is the format of an authors file for git svn, specifically for special characters like backslash or underscore?

I am trying to clone Papercut, an smtp server emulator

I'm getting the list of SVN authors with svn log -q https://papercut.svn.codeplex.com/svn | grep -e '^r'| awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"};{print $2}'|sort|uniq which is giving me

RNO\_MCLWEB
SND\krobertson_cp

I created an authors.txt with the SVN_User = UserName <Email> format, but when I run

git svn clone --no-metadata -A authors.txt https://papercut.svn.codeplex.com/svn papercut

it complains "Author: RNO\_MCLWEB not defined in authors.txt file"

I've tried with putting a \ before the '\' and '_' to try to escape them, and adding quotes around the name, but neither worked.

I can't find any better description of the authors.txt file format than SVN_User = UserName <Email>

Solution

I hate to be "that guy", but I just gave it a try and it worked fine for me. Here's the copy of the authors file I used:

RNO\_MCLWEB = Ronald McDonald <[email protected]>
SND\krobertson_cp = Some Guy <[email protected]>

I did, however, use a slightly different method than you did to generate author names, following these directions. My specific incantation was:

$ svn log --xml | grep author | sort -u | perl -pe 's/.>(.?)<./$1 = /'

I'm also using Git 1.6.6.1 (doubt that makes a difference, but you never know).

I did notice that when I used your pipeline to get the SVN authors, there were spaces in front of their SVN usernames in the resulting file (i.e., there was a space in column 1 on each line). Don't know if that makes a difference or not.