Re: [Groff] groff repo conversion in progress

[Eric S. Raymond]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden>:
> However, the last entry before that was
> 
>   Fri Aug 15 08:51:47 1997  Eric S. Raymond  <address@hidden>
> 
>         * README, PROJECTS, NEWS, INSTALL, VERSION,
>         doc/Makefile. doc/pic.ms, groff/groff.man: 
>         Prepare for 1.11 release.  No code changes.
>         Documentation for pic added (doc/pic.ms).  
> 
> Did you have access to the CVS then?

I do not remember.  I had completely forgotten that I contributed to
groff that early.  Of course I remember writing pic.ms, but not that
it was merged in *1997*.

Do we have archived tarballs from before the CVS?  It would be pretty easy to
graft those onto the history.  And now would be the time to do it.
 
> Yes, I fully agree that the commit style I used was far from perfect,
> committing a lot of stuff with a single commit which I would today
> split into multiple, smaller commits.  

We all all had the same tendency back when commit was an expensive
operation.
 
> > I'll look at this some more to see what percentage of cases I cab
> > salvage, but I think we have to accept that the view of older
> > sections of the history in gitk isn't going to be very pretty.
> 
> Yeah.  IMHO, we have to live with that, and investing more time fix
> log entries before 2009 or 2010 is probably a waste.

All right, I'm not going to put a lot of effort into it then.  That
means I could finish this today, but I have a major GPSD release to
ship so it will probably wait until Monday or so.

For your interest, and so you and the other listmembers can see how
this was done, I'm enclosing a tarball containing copies of the
current authormap file (which is what you modified, with five entries
added and some address removals reverted), the reposurgeon lift
script, and the Makefile.

You could redo the entire conversion yourself by untarring this, going
into the directory, typing "make groff-mirror", waiting for the rsync
to finish, and then "make groff-fi".  (Of course you'd need
reposurgeon and cvs-fast-export in your path.)  

The only step missing is the trivial last one; feed groff.fi to git
fast import to get a live repo. Any work I do on cleaning up comments 
will be expressed as an edit here-doc in the lift script.  Again,
to make the process redoable - one of the design goals of reposurgeon
is to make the entire conversion process replicable so there is an
audit trail.
 
If you want me to install the live repo when it's ready, I'll need
project admin permissions at Savannah.  Otherwise I will cheerfully
deliver it on any drop site you like.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

groff-conversion.tar.gz
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