I don't recall exactly what was the context but on one of your repo at Six Apart we had the beginning of the project imported into the public repostitory using an external tool (svk I think), I made a patch to git-svn (quick and dirty) to look into the subversion log message and correctly attach the commit to the original author.
The original commit messages have this format:
# r123@host (orig r1234): author | 2006-05-17 17:07:42 -0700
