Offer of help with move to git

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus dot com>]

I learned on G+ that there's discussion of moving the GCC repository
to git going on.  Some of you might already be aware that I did both
the groff CVS -> git conversion and the Emacs bzr -> git conversion,
and am pretty much the go-to guy for high-quality conversions of
important projects.  Since I rate GCC as an extremely important
project, I'm willing to be helpful with yours.

I'm now running a test conversion using the workflow described here:

DVCS migration HOWTO:
     http://www.catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon/dvcs-migration-guide.html

Whoever you designate to lead the conversion *should read this
document first*.  High-quality repository conversions are no longer a
crapshoot or a black art, but they're not necessarily simple either,
especially not in the all-too-common case that your repository history
contains subtle malformations.

Hwew's a particular warning: though you may be using git-svn for live
gatewaying, it is *not* the way to go for full-history conversions, as
it is likely to screw up the history in ways that are not apparent
from merely looking at the head revision.  The dump analyzer in my
reposurgeon tool does a substantially better job.

Fortunately, Subversion is about the least bad non-DVCS to start a git
conversion from; it's the most common case and my tools for it are
pretty bulletproof. Problems are most likely if the SVN repo was
previously converted from CVS, a process which in the past tended
to leave nasty scars in the metadata.

I can't tell if you have those sorts of artifacts yet, mainly because
mirroring and processing SVN repos as large as yours is painfully slow
even on the Great Beast, a machine I designed s[ecifically for this
sort of workload.  I'll check in again once I've scoped the job.

In the mean time, I'm enclosing a contributor map that will need to be
filled in whoever does the conversion.  The right sides should become
full names and preferred email addresses.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

Attachment: gcc.map
Description: Text document