The GCC Git Conversion Heats Up With Hopes Of Converting Over The Holidays

Decided back at the GNU Tools Cauldron was a timeline to aim converting from Subversion as their default revision control system to Git over the New Year's holiday. For that to happen, by the middle of December they wanted to decide what conversion system to use for bringing all their SVN commits to Git. As such, now it's heating up ahead of that decision.

Eric S Raymond announced the conversion work in progress. Right now he's been working on addressing the remaining problems with Reposurgeon in being able to convert the GCC SVN repository to Git. Following those lingering issues being resolved, he's seeking broader review of the Reposurgeon "recipe" and then "the conversion progress starts to become desirable."

Raymond has been working on the GCC conversion to Git for about two years. Back in summer 2018 the conversion was delayed over "hideously expensive" DDR4 memory prices with his program and workstation not coping well with the size of the GCC code-base and its many commits over the years. The problem then morphed into converting the code from Python to Go and other headaches along the way.

This year E.S.R. then upgraded to AMD Threadripper and with the more powerful system and more RAM still ended up being a task that would take months longer. Finally in September he announced the conversion was within the realm of the practically achievable. While now this/next week looks like things could be panning out if his latest beliefs are accurate.

Meanwhile though a Linaro developer, Maxim Kuvyrkov, this year took to working on a new GCC SVN to Git conversion script based on the existing git-svn. Maxim and Eric have the two primary competing solutions for moving the GNU Compiler Collection over to Git.

Maxim provided an update on the conversion script he's been working on. Overall things there seem to be going fairly well but some issues he has been dealing with. Though ESR was quick to jump in saying that he doesn't trust git-svn at all, among other comments.

In any case, hopefully there soon will be a decision on the official route for bringing the GNU Compiler Collection code-base into Git and ideally at the start of 2020 will mark their start of a Git-based workflow.