Re: moving to git

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On 13 Apr 2008, at 08:42, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hi Gary,

Hallo Ralf!

> * Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 02:09:58PM CEST:
> > 1. Thomas Tanner has many many commits with no message.  If we ever
> >   decide to move to generating a ChangeLog from the commit log, we'll
> >   lose a lot of information:
>
> Hmm.  Well, I don't think we should ever try to generate ChangeLog for
> past commits.  Besides practical hassles, this can also cause legal
> ones.  We may however want to do this for new commits at some point in
> the future.  While my opinion about is that I would rather get  
> people to
> use a script like ./commit to ensure ChangeLog and commit message are
> synchronized, this part of the discussion isn't important ATM: it's
> independently useful to have good commit messages for old log entries,
> we can discuss the rest later.

I prefer the ./commit approach too.

> I can try to adjust my filter-branch script to rewrite those commits
> that have an empty CVS log message, to use the ChangeLog diff.
> That should help, so I'll try this.

If it's easy, that would be great.  It's not worth burning much effort
over though IMHO.

> > 2. Alexandre Oliva seems to have many commits that cover several  
> > patches
> >   and/or commit authors:
>
> I don't know how to fix this in any automatized way.  It looks like he
> just committed them to CVS all at once.  My take is that we have to  
> live
> with it, there is no information lost in the CVS -> git conversion.
>
> > 3. There seem to be several commit logs by other authors that  
> > suffer the
> >   same problem (though not as drastically as Alexandre Oliva):
>
> Same reason, I looked up the examples you gave in the RCS ,v files.

ACK.  As long as the conversion is doing the right thing, then we  
haven't
lost anything, so there's no need to change anything here.

> > 4. For a time we put the committer of a change in the ChangeLog entry
> >   and credited the author on a separate line, especially if they
> >   submitted a patch with no ChangeLog entry.  Maybe we'd like to
> >   fix that in the commit history?  (We stopped doing it when RMS
> >   told us it was legally wrong)
>
> Oops, I didn't know that.  Hmm, there is several commits matching
>  grep '^        From .*@' ChangeLog*
>
> (note the TAB), but there are several more matching
>  grep 'From ' ChangeLog
>
> and here the credits are not necessarily on a separate line, often do
> not have an email address, may span more than one line, may be at the
> beginning or at the end of a ChangeLog entry.

Yuck.  Well, again, nothing is regressing if we just port across what
we have.

> Unless you press hard, I'm inclined not to work on this one.

If you think of an easy way to fixup even some of them, then that is a
nice bonus.  If not, then never mind :-D

Maybe just matching commits with '^     From .*@', containing no blank
lines, and using the email address as the Author Name if necessary will
catch a good portion without too much effort?

Cheers,
        Gary
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