We will be moving to GCP for all Linux builds, so you will be able to assume sudo will be available.
In the mean time, though, if git-svn can’t satisfy the dependency, then there is not much we can do to avoid it. (In other words, the failure will happen outside the context of Travis CI.)
As I mentioned I have thus far been unable to reproduce it outside of travis. I think the dependency issue stems from the installation of a much newer git (2.19.1) then is available by default on xenial.
Could you tell me how you are installing git on the images so I can try to reproduce it locally and figure out a workaround?
Apparently, the universe repository is already enabled (and always was), as the git-svn package is found just fine It is found, because it complains about the git version.
The problem is that the xenial-universe version of git-svn requires an older git package than found in the git PPA that travis uses.
Yeah, I didn’t find any way in the Launchpad Web UI to vew the contents of a PPA – so had to explore the repo metadata by hand. Given that hosting PPAs is one of the site’s core functions, this is a very strange omission.
I ran into this issue as well, but git-core seems to be not available via addon on Bionic based builds as it fails with Disallowing sources: git-core. So I had to specify the source manually there: