Thu 2008/Jun/26

• John says:

  The main reason [why git-mirror.gnome.org doesn't make git.gnome.org any easier] is of course the polluted logs (filled with git-svn rev id metadata). I would resist any module having a Git repo with such ickyness in its history.

  This is a non-issue. Ruby on Rails used to be hosted on Subversion, and then it switched to Git. To do the conversion, they simply used git-svn. You can do "git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git", then "git log" and search for "git-svn" in the output in order to find the git-svn metadata.

  You'll see this:

  ... git-based development goes here ...
  
  commit 67022671bfa28d5675a30925a8d1e271c576f4d2
  Author: David Heinemeier Hansson <david@loudthinking.com>
  Date:   Thu Apr 10 22:09:13 2008 -0500
  
      Testing commits
  
  commit ed99dda174da439a0947cdabea3babf027c672ac
  Author: Rick Olson <technoweenie@gmail.com>
  Date:   Thu Apr 10 18:06:05 2008 +0000
  
      Change validates_uniqueness_of :case_sensitive option default back to true (from [9160]).  Love your database columns, do
  n't LOWER them.  [rick]
      
      git-svn-id: http://svn-commit.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk@9248 5ecf4fe2-1ee6-0310-87b1-e25e094e27de
  
  ... svn-based development went here ...
  	    

  So, in the commit logs, you have everything since $beginning_of_time until $switchover_date with the git-svn-id strings, and everything after that without any such garbage, as would be normal for "plain" git repositories.

  Having that metadata in the log actually provides valuable information.

  If you have to do code archaeology (which Eric Sink calls "traceability"), then the commit log will tell you when the svn->git switchover occured. Before that point, you know that any branches are dead-ends and merges are funny (svn didn't handle them).

  You'll know that before the switchover point, information about code attribution will not be 100% clear, as you couldn't specify --author in an svn commit (so you'll perhaps have to look at the actual ChangeLog and hope that the committer was kind enough to say "original patch by $author").

  When you do a conversion between revision control systems, you keep the old system around in read-only mode for if anything goes wrong. It's nice to know that if we ever need to check something in the original SVN repository, we'll have the SVN revision numbers from the git-svn metadata.

  Finally, the git-svn strings in commit logs will disappear really quickly from your everyday view. They just appear further and furter back in time, and you seldom look at those commits, anyway.

• Mario Ðanić has been investigating about adapting Gitorious for KDE. He says he would be happy to talk to people who would like to adapt Gitorious for GNOME's needs as well. Among other things, Mario is working on the Summer of Code to write a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service.

Syndicated 2008-06-26 10:55:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log