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

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) plans for transitioning from SVN to Git over New Year's Day looks like for sure now that goal will not be realized. There still is no firm consensus over which SVN to Git conversion approach to utilize.

On Christmas Eve, Eric S Raymond announced his Reposurgeon software should be ready for a full and correct GCC conversion of the SVN source tree to Git. Since then, various minors bugs have been pointed out and tweaking to Reposurgeon has continued.

Meanwhile, Linaro's Maxim Kuvyrkov with his alternative SVN-to-Git conversion solution has also been argued is up to this big task.

Maxim wrote on Sunday after finding more possible bugs in ESR's Reposurgeon, "I am sure, these and whatever other problems I may find in the reposurgeon conversion can be fixed in time. However, I don't see why should bother. My conversion has been available since summer 2019, I made it ready in time for GCC Cauldron 2019, and it didn't change in any significant way since then. With the "Missed merges" problem I don't see how reposurgeon conversion can be considered "ready". Also, I expected a diligent developer to compare new conversion (aka reposurgeon's) against existing conversion (aka gcc-pretty / gcc-reparent) before declaring the new conversion "better" or even "ready". The data I'm seeing in differences between my and reposurgeon conversions shows that gcc-reparent conversion is /better/. I suggest that GCC community adopts either gcc-pretty or gcc-reparent conversion."

Since then, the debate has continued on the GCC mailing list. So it's looking like the debate over which SVN-to-Git approach for GCC's massive and long history will continue into January and not kicking off 2020 right away with a Git workflow... Hopefully it won't take too much longer so the GCC upstream developers can move on to working on the compiler code rather than how to best convert their source tree.