One of the drawbacks to working on Cassandra is that unlike every other OSS project I have ever worked on, we are using a patch-oriented development process rather than post-commit review. It's really quite painfully slow. Somehow this became sort of the default for ASF projects, but there is precedent for switching to post-commit review eventually. In the meantime, there is git-svn. (The ASF does have a git mirror set up , but I'm going to ignore that because (a) its reliability has been questionable and (b) sticking with git-svn hopefully makes this more useful for non-ASF projects.) Disclaimer: I am not a git expert , and probably some of this will make you cringe if you are. Still, I hope it will be useful for some others fumbling their way towards enlightenment. As background, I suggest the git crash course for svn users . Just the parts up to the Remote section. Checkout: git-svn init https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/trunk cassandra Once that...