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The Debate Over GCC's SVN-to-Git Conversion Approach Won't Be Settled This Year

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  • #11
    Originally posted by brainlet_pederson
    The conversion is proving to be hard because the original itself is full of botched history, thanks to the sloppiness of SVN/CVS. In the (very rare) event they need the exact, original history, they can just go back and work on the SVN repo directly.
    The entire purpose of this effort is to move away from SVN. Splitting the version history across two incompatible systems is worse than doing nothing at all. ESR is right - as is typically the case, after the dust settles.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by brainlet_pederson
      You clearly haven't bothered to do any reading about this. Preserving history is obviously important.
      Then why did you claim that the reason I stated for preserving it are "marketing"?

      The problem is, how much effort is it worth to preserve a few, minor conversion artefacts that were broken even in the original repo?
      I never commented on that. I responded to a post that claimed that preserving version history was only for "archeologists" by stating why it was important.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by brainlet_pederson
        But that's not an even remotely accurate characterization of what either conversion is doing.
        Huh? This is what YOU were suggesting as an alternative to the conversion methods.

        Originally posted by brainlet_pederson
        Bullshit. Just moving to a git workflow would be a massive boon to development.
        Spoken like someone who has never actually managed a project on a fractured repository.

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        • #14
          If the blocker here is a few edge cases, why not convert now and keep the old repo as an upstream? After you fix the edge cases you can pull the changes and rebase (forcefully, if needed) on that.

          And I'm pretty sure despite this "history is important" discussion, we're all aware going forward, nobody will ever care about some weird merge done on some GCC 4 branch years ago. On top of that, SVN allows commits in tags (because it doesn't actually have tags), would you want to pull those in as well? Because, you know, otherwise you're not preserving history.

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          • #15
            Oh my.
            Color me surprised!

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            • #16
              Originally posted by crystall View Post
              Because you need to be able to search history to track down the origin of a bug, the reason why a change was introduced, to perform a bisection while looking for a regression, to be able to backport patches to older branches... I could go on for a while. For large projects having accurate and functioning history in your VCS is extremely important.
              You can still do all the things you mention by keeping history in the old system. You can even argue that history will be more accurate by nature, if not converting it. Maybe it will incur some minor inconvenience for these use cases for a period of time. But the usefulness of "old" history very quickly fades, and a couple of years ahead most will have no use for it anyway.

              The other thing is, the burden of postponing the switch and afterwards dragging along a giant repository is very real now and going forward.

              How many mega/gigabytes is the converted repository? I guess 'git clone --depth ...' will be mandatory from the beginning

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              • #17
                Just copy and past these damn files with nautilus or something like that. Or MC

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                • #18
                  Some governments have less bureaucracy.

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                  • #19
                    The GCC folks should let the Debian crowd vote on the best tool to migrate from SVN to Git.

                    The Debian crowd will decide on a direction ... and in a few years they will decide on a direction AGAIN.
                    Last edited by NotMine999; 30 December 2019, 03:37 PM. Reason: Because i wanted to.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by NotMine999 View Post
                      The GCC folks should let the Debian crowd vote on the best tool to migrate from SVN to Git.

                      The Debian crowd will decide on a direction ... and in a few years they will decide on a direction AGAIN.
                      Except the second vote will just end up confirming what people are really doing because no one followed the first vote.

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