Reposurgeon status

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

Since the subject of repository conversions has come up, a situation report...

I am in the very last stages of qualifying the Go port of reposurgeon.
Most importantly to your project, the Go code passed all of the
existing regression tests for reading Subversion stream dumps two days
ago. That is a big deal, as the stream dump reader was by *far* the
trickiest and most bug-prone part to translate.

Am now working on debugging a fairly peripheral feature called the
extractor harness.  This is what you use when a VCS doesn't have a
stream dump format and you have to call its CLI and mine the reports
from the CLI tools to get out the conyent and metadata. Not needed for
the GCC move.  The main application for it is actually lifting
Mercurial repositories - their export tools are weak and poorly
supported.

After that I want to get topological sorting of commits working in Go.
Also not needed for the GCC move, but I don't want to have any loose ends
dangling when I dive back into that.

Third and last item, clearing my current bug list.  The big one is
that last time I looked there was something wrong near execute-bit
propagation in interpreting Subversion dumps. But it is actually
possible that I've already fixed this in passing while verifying the
port - I found a suspicious failure to distinguish between "no
property set" and "an empty property set" last week.

I think I'm looking at somewhere between 7 and 14 days until I can start 
work on the GCC move again. Getting to this point has taken a year.

However, the hopes of a big speedup look like they'll be borne out.
Preliminary indications are that my test runs will be at least 12x
faster. In part due to Go and in part due to a new Great Beast, a 16-core
Threadripper machine with 128GB ram.  Finishing the move should now
be within the realm of the practically achievable.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>