Re: [Groff] GNU Bazaar import of Groff

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 04:36:23PM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> Hmm.  Sorry to say, but this doesn't look very good IMHO.  Why are
> there so many revisions without a summary?  This is really bad and
> almost completely useless.  Compare this to, say, parsecvs, which does
> a wonderful job in interpreting CVS-style commit messages while
> converting to git.
> 
> I won't use this repository in its current form.  Any chance to do it
> better?  Or is this an artifact from the `loggerhead' interface (which
> I doubt)?

Actually, your last conjecture is the right one.

It seems that your CVS commit messages are slightly unusual (as CVS
commit messages go); you usually put an extra blank line at the start.
The commit message is transcribed verbatim from CVS into Bazaar. Unlike
git, bzr doesn't have a built-in distinction between summary and
description; it just has a single multi-line description, which means
that copying it directly from CVS is the right thing to do.

loggerhead constructs its "summary" by just taking the first line of
each description. The 'get_summary' method in bzr's internal library
does this too, but it's more intelligent about it. You can tell that
this is just a loggerhead problem by looking at e.g.:

  $ bzr log --line lp:groff | head
  1817: wl 2009-02-21 Add a new `file' warning category.
  1816: wl 2009-02-18 * doc/groff.texinfo: Improve documentation of `lsm' 
requ...
  1815: wl 2009-02-14 Implement a leading spaces macro request, `lsm', in 
anal...
  1814: wl 2009-02-10 * man/groff.man: Document missing number registers 
(`$$'...
  1813: wl 2009-01-19 Fix incorrect grops color state before \X'...'.
  1812: wl 2009-01-10 Version 1.20.1 released
  1811: wl 2009-01-08 * */Makefile.* (CLEANADD, CLEANNOTSRCDIRADD, 
CLEANDIRADD...
  1810: wl 2009-01-06 Remove heuristics for LIBEXT.
  1809: wl 2009-01-05 Typo.
  1808: wl 2009-01-05 Update FDL 1.1 to FDL 1.3.

Thus the branch is just fine (it's a faithful copy of how things look in
CVS), and none of this is a problem when using the branch locally.
However, loggerhead is definitely producing suboptimal output and needs
to be fixed. I've filed a bug report with a trivial fix attached, which
makes it look much more sensible:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/loggerhead/+bug/335035

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden