Eric S Raymond Believes Reposurgeon Is Finally Ready For Full & Correct GCC Conversion

After many delays, and seemingly as a Christmas miracle, Eric S Raymond now believes his Reposurgeon utility is officially ready to convert GCC's SVN repository over to Git.

If you aren't familiar with the long and drawn out process it's taken for migrating GCC from SVN to Git given the size of the code-base and its long history, see this earlier article about the big task at hand and ultimately how multiple solutions were devised to cover the conversion process accurately. ESR has been on the task the longest with his Reposurgeon effort but it involved delays due to RAM prices, the decision to rewrite the code in Go rather than Python, and many other challenges along the way.

But on Christmas Eve, Eric S Raymond announced on the GCC mailing list, "We believe reposurgeon is now feature-complete for a full and correct GCC conversion. Caveat: The repository is too large for verification on every single revision to be practical."

It's also not quite 100% buttoned up but is said to be in the days ahead, "We have five remaining minor issues, mostly related to user-generated .gitignore files (as opposed to files generarted from svn:ignore properties) that should not affect the GCC conversion. We expect to fix these over the next few days, anyway."

The hope had been for the GNU Compiler Collection to migrate from SVN to Git over the New Year's holidays and to begin 2020 in their Git workflow, though as they have been late in deciding between the solutions and these last minute debates, that's not looking likely but hopefully in 2020 this transition will finally be complete.