[racket-dev] proposal for moving to packages: repository

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Thu May 23 06:57:59 EDT 2013

A few minutes ago, Carl Eastlund wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 5:49 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 
>     9 hours ago, Carl Eastlund wrote:
>     > I was going to comment on the same thing.  While a naive use
>     > of "git filter-branch" might not retain the history, it should
>     > be entirely possible to do something a little more intelligent
>     > and keep that history.
>    
>     Just to be clear, this is exactly what you can't get with
>     filter-branch.
>    
>     > Essentially each of the new repositories could keep the entire
>     > history of the original repository, followed by a massive
>     > move/rename, then moving forward with an individual package.
>    
>     This can work, but it is unrelated to filter-branch: it's
>     basically starting each package repository from a clone of the
>     monolithic repo, then move & shuffle things around.
>    
>     This seems wrong to me in all kinds of ways -- but if someone
>     wants to do this with *their* package (ie, not a package that I
>     need to deal with), then it's certainly an option.
> 
> It doesn't seem wrong to me.  It's an accurate representation of the
> history of the project, which is exactly what git is for retaining. 
> Where does the problem come from?

The problem of filter-branch?  It has no problems, it does exactly
what it is supposed to do.


> If git filter-branch doesn't maintain the history we need, it's not
> the right tool for the job.

If the drracket files are irrelevant for the swindle package then they
shouldn't be in the swindle repository -- and on the exact same token,
the development history of drracket shouldn't be there either.

(This is not new, BTW, I think that there was general concensus right
from the start of the package talk that the monolithic repo is just a
host for a bunch of separate projects.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!


Posted on the dev mailing list.