Getting svn branches back from oblivion

Hi there,
I was wondering which was the best way to get back an old branch from
svn into a usable git branch... (namely the gopher one)

I was thinking either:
- make patches manually from svn and apply this to a git checkout from
the base rev, then rebase and push to the public repos,

- or create a repos using git-svn, add it as a remote, cherry pick the
commits into a branch from the base commit from master, rebase it, and
push it public.

Anyone already tried one of those approaches, or another one ?

François.