Re: That light at the end of the tunnel?

[Richard Biener <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>]

On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 1:39 PM Eric S. Raymond <esr@grelber.thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 09:26:10AM +0200, Richard Biener wrote:
> > Can you summarize what is wrong with our current git mirror which was IIRC created by git-svn importing?
>
> git-svn tends to do subtle danage damage to the back history.  See my PSA at
> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6778
>
> Partial quote:
>
>     The problem with git-svn as a full importer is that it is not robust in the presence
>     of repository malformations and edge cases – and these are all too common, both as
>     a result of operator errors and scar tissue left by previous conversions from CVS. If
>     anyone on your project has ever done a plain cp rather than “svn cp” when creating a
>     tag directory, or deleted a branch or tag and then recreated it, or otherwise
>     offended against the gods of the Subversion data model, git-svn will cheerfully,
>     silently seize on that flaw and amplify the hell out of it in your git translation.
>
>
>     The result is likely to be a repository that looks just right enough at the head end
>     to hide damage further back in the history. People often fail to notice this because
>     they don’t actually spend much time looking at old revisions after a repository
>     conversion – but on the rare occasions when history damage bites you it’s going to
>     bite hard.
>
> Since I wrote that I have learned that git-svn full conversions also have a tendency
> to screw up the location of branch joins.

Ok, so let me ask whether you can currently convert trunk and gcc-{6,7,8}-branch
successfully, ignoring "merges" into them (shouldn't have happened).  All other
branches can in theory be converted later if required, right?

Richard.