Users who have been using Linux for awhile often learn that creating a basic script is a good way to run multiple, often-repeated commands. Adding a little color to scripts can additionally provide nice feedback. This can be done in a fairly straight-forward way by using the tput command.

A common way of doing this is to define the colors that…

It can be awfully tempting to make some changes to an existing open-source project [1]. Some of that excitement diminishes when one realizes how long a git-svn clone will take on a large project repo, like Python. The gain git-svn gives you in terms of quick history lookup is taken as cost in the beginning.

Instead, we can do a "shallow-copy" to get the last few revisions.