How to handle SVN externals when migrating to Git

Question

I'm currently migrating our SVN repositories to git and I'm not sure how to handle the SVN externals.

I normally would clone and add them as git submodules since I want to keep track of the changes and also push commits to the submodule's repo. Unfortunately git by default clones the whole repo but I only need a subdirectory of it.

The external repo looks similar to this.

external/bar/lib/
external/foo/
external/foo.sln
...

So I thought about using sparse-checkout to only clone the external/bar/lib/directory to my main project but I'm not sure If I still can do normal git operations like commit, push, pull and branch in the submodule when using a sparse checkout or how to handle the case when I also want to include external/foo/ in my main project.

Answer 1

Ideally, each relevant folder of external/ should have been git-svn exported in their own individual Git repository:

external/bar/lib/ => lib.git
external/foo/ => foo.git

That way, no need to worry about sparse checkout (which would indeed limit the ability to push back commits)