[Orgmode] Re: IMPORTANT: Migration of org-mode.git to the new server on sunday 5pm-7pm CET (UTC+1)

[Bernt Hansen]

Achim Gratz <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Bastien,
>
> Bastien <address@hidden> writes:
>> It will be important to clone again after the migration as this repo
>> comes with a major change: there is no ORGWEBPAGES/ directory anymore.
>> We have moved ORGWEBPAGES/ in a separate repo, which might get public
>> later.
>
> As Bernt Hansen has already remarked, this is somewhat against the
> spirit of Git...  There may be reasons to do what you seem to want to
> do, but I don't get what they might be at the moment - could you
> perhaps elaborate?
>
> May I ask you to consider to just put ORGWEBPAGES into a separate
> branch?  More specifically, create a new branch for ORGWEBPAGES and rm
> all other stuff, then rm ORGWEBPAGES from the master / maint branches.
> This way it's easy enough to build clones that track all or just
> selected branches from a single repository which preserves commit
> history.

It's perfectly okay to extract the ORGWEBPAGE content and history into
a new repository for future work on the website.  We can then remove the
ORGWEBPAGES directory with a single commit in the org-mode.git
repository since that is no longer being used and move forward from
there.

There's no reason to keep the ORGWEBPAGE directory around in a branch in
org-mode.git repository if it isn't ever going to be used again.  I
think deleting the content with a commit is the correct way to deal with
this in org-mode.git.

The only reason to use filter-branch to remove the ORGWEBPAGE history
and content (and create a totally new repository with new SHA1 for every
historical commit) is if it contained some proprietary stuff that really
should not be shared with the public.  You would do this before making
the repository public and for org-mode.git it is already way to late for
that.

Using filter-branch on an existing git repository is highly intrusive
since it breaks everyone's clone of the repository and any work in
process needs to be extracted and applied to the new repository.  It's
doable but painful and something that we should strive to avoid unless
it is absolutely necessary.

HTH,
Bernt