[plt-dev] Migrating branches to git

I propose that Eli declare some date at which point he will take the
current SVN trunk and move it over to git. If anyone wants to get
their branches (past present or future) into git they can ask him for
help (and he might give it) but it is their own responsibility.

(To me, the below just looks like too much trouble to be worth anything.)

Robby

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> There is a problem with migrating branches "properly" to git.  (If you
> don't care about branches, past or present, you can skip reading the
> rest of this message.)
>
> The problem comes from subversion's non-existent recording of merges
> (at least pre-1.5, but also post 1.5 it looks like `svn:mergeinfo'
> it's not always reliable).  The short story is that when you copy a
> file (as happens when you create a branch by copying the trunk), then
> subversion keeps the original path it came from, but when you merge
> changes from a branch to the trunk, then from the svn pov this is just
> like any other commit on the trunk, no formal relation to the branch
> it came from.
>
> By now I tried a good number of tools, with numerous configurations
> and tweaks, and none of them did the right thing wrt branch merges.
> (Debugging this process is extremely expensive: *fast* tools do a
> conversion in about 2-3 hours, slow ones take about 12-15 hours.)  So
> I'm giving up on this and going back to mirror *only* the trunk and
> the release tags.
>
> Note that this means losing some historical commit information (ie,
> their diff and the log message), but there is no loss of actual
> files.  For example, say that svn has these revisions:
>
>  ...
>  r10: change on the trunk
>  r11: copy trunk to branches/foo/bar
>  r12: change on branches/foo/bar
>  r13: change on the trunk
>  r14: change on branches/foo/bar
>  r15: merge branches/foo/bar to the trunk (which is a change on it)
>  r16: change on the trunk
>  ...
>
> the log history that you will see in git (by default, unless you do
> the below) is:
>
>  ...
>  r10
>  r13
>  r15
>  r16
>  ...
>
> with the corresponding log messages.
>
>
> This leaves two problems that need solutions:
>
> 1. Branches that are still live
>
> 2. Branches with merges that people actually care to preserve in the
>   git history.
>
> So if you have branches in either of these categories, you need to
> read on.  Note in particular the first point: if you have a live
> branch that was not merged into the trunk you *NEED* to tell me about
> it.  (If you don't then it's still possible to recover: just finish
> your work and create a patch based on svn which I'll apply on the git
> tree, but it's better to deal with it now.)
>
> 1. If you have a live branch, you need to tell me its name (= its
>   path).  What I will do is arrange for the conversion to preserve
>   your branch, which will create it on the central git repository.
>   Then when it goes live, you will clone the git repository including
>   your branch, and finally I will remove the branch from the server
>   (since they're all individual-work branches).
>
> 2. If you have branches that you care to include their historical
>   information in git, you need to mail me the following information
>   for every branch and merge point you want to preserve.  (This works
>   only for branches that are copies of trunk.)
>
>     * The branch name
>     * The revision it was created in
>     * the last revision that took place on it
>     * The revision number where it was merged to the trunk
>
>   (I will then use this information to force the same ancestry
>   structure in the git repository using grafts.)
>
>   It is also possible to deal with more complicated multiple branches
>   (ie, you created foo/bar1, worked some, merged it and the trunk
>   into foo/bar2, etc) -- in such cases you will need to tell me the
>   exact topology too, in similar terms to the above.
>
> --
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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