"Suppose you're using git-svn to work with a certain SVN repository. Since you don't like 'git-svn fetch' to take forever, and you don't want to accidentally interrupt it and end up corrupting your repository, you set up a remote Git repository to mirror the SVN repository, which does its own 'git-svn fetch' on a cronjob; now you can 'git-fetch' from the Git mirror into your local repository, and still dcommit to SVN when you have changes to push."