AW: Development - an outsider’s perspective

[Carsten Wenderdel]

Hello again,

first I’d like to apologise for sending the same message three times. Should 
not happen again.

About a migration to git: I tried two different tools with different results:

a) cvs-fast-export, from https://gitlab.com/esr/cvs-fast-export
b) cvs2git, part of cvs2svn, from https://github.com/mhagger/cvs2svn

For a) you can see the result here: 
https://github.com/carsten-wenderdel/gnubg-fast-export
- When converting both modules “gnubg” and “gnubg-nn” it moved the latter as a 
folder “nn” into the “gnubg” folder. That’s strange, but if those two 
modules/folders don’t reference each other, it shouldn’t harm. Also once in 
git, those folders can be moved without losing the history.
- It didn’t convert the tags properly. We could add tags manually, but still 
not good.

For b) you can see the result here: 
https://github.com/carsten-wenderdel/gnubg-cvs2svn
When looking at a file like 
https://github.com/carsten-wenderdel/gnubg-cvs2svn/blob/main/gnubg/eval.c, 
GitHub won’t show the history and instead says: "Cannot retrieve latest commit 
at this time.”
I think this is a glitch in GitHub, because locally the history is visible via 
“git log --follow -- gnubg/eval.c”
Also, when hitting the “Blame” button on that webpage, a “History” button 
becomes visible, leading to 
https://github.com/carsten-wenderdel/gnubg-cvs2svn/commits/main/gnubg/eval.c

As a conclusion: I think cvs2git did a good enough job preserving the commit 
history of the CVS history.

Another open question: As “author” git would always use the user handle of the 
CVS committer. Do we want to have full name and email address instead? That’s 
possible if those tools would be fed with a file mapping those user handles 
(like “plm”) to full name / email address. As with CVS committer and author 
often were different people this might not be wanted though.

Still hoping to hear more opinions!
Carsten

> 3. Repository: Ease of use
> 
> People with less than 15 years of development experience have probably never 
> used CVS. Everything is git today. The most visibility gnubg would have on 
> GitHub.Some developers care about their contribution statistics on GitHub; 
> commits on Savannah are basically hidden. GitHub also provides CI (Linux, 
> Windows, Mac) free of cost for public repositories.
> 
> So my suggestion is to first move the repository to GitHub. I’m willing to 
> help with the move and could also create GitHub actions for CI that 
> automatically build gnubg with every pull request. What are your thoughts?