Re: Goals for repo conversion day

[Andreas Schwab]

There is one more thing in the history that may be worth fixing, though
it may lead to quite a bit of manual work.  Before emacs switched to CVS
the sources were kept in RCS, and files were deleted by renaming the RCS
file prefixing its name with "=" (to keep the history, since RCS doesn't
have the concept of an attic like CVS).  The obstacle is that there is
no record of this deletion except in the ChangeLog file, and at that
time the ChangeLog files weren't kept in RCS (they were versioned by
numbered backups only).  So in order to find the exact point in time
when the file has been deleted for real one would have to grep the
ChangeLog file for mentioning the deletion and look up the surrounding
text in the commit log.  For example, the file lisp/speedbspec.el only
exists as lisp/=speedbspec.el in the current history, added in commit
73bf48f.  The next mentioning of the string "speedbspec.el" was in
commit ab18f00, which corresponds to the point where the file was
deleted.  The corresponding changelog file (lisp/ChangeLog.7) has this
entry:

1998-07-10  Eric M. Ludlam  <address@hidden>

        * speedbspec.el: Deleted; now integrated into speedbar.el.
        * speedbar.el: More commentary.

Note that the first line of the entry isn't mentioned in commit ab18f00,
but we now know that the file was deleted here.  The next commit
touching this file is 1c3e7fb with the message "properly mark Attic
files as deleted", where the file was finally deleted from the tree.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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"And now for something completely different."