Test GCC conversion with reposurgeon available

[Segher Boessenkool]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 05:16:54PM +0000, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Dec 2019, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> > > That's because that commit also edits ChangeLog entries from other 
> > > authors.  When a commit adds / edits ChangeLog entries for more than one 
> > > author (the difference between purely editing an existing entry and adding 
> > > a new one, possibly under an existing date/author header, for a 
> > > multi-author commit, is not something that can reliably be determined 
> > > automatically), the conversion falls back to using the committer identity 
> > > instead of picking one of the multiple relevant authors from the ChangeLog 
> > > files.
> > 
> > There is only one relevant author in r270511.  It edits a few wrong path
> > names in the previous changelog entries.  People often do similar things
> > (like fixing the commit date :-) )
> 
> Distinguishing "edits a previous ChangeLog entry" from "adds a new entry 
> under a previous ChangeLog header for a change included in the commit" is 
> a human judgement.

We are doing only one conversion here, the one of the GCC repo.  The
heuristic works, we checked it did.

> > Either never use <account>@gcc.gnu.org, or always use it, don't do the
> > worst of both worlds?
> 
> The heuristics here are to use an attribution from ChangeLog for the 
> author where unambiguous, but to use the committer (always @gcc.gnu.org / 
> @gnu.org [*], so avoiding attributions at the wrong company even where 
> people were using multiple addresses simultaneously for different changes) 
> as author if in doubt.

You never need that, and it is worse to use two different schemes than to
choose either.

I would have chosen the "<account>@gcc.gnu.org" scheme, because it is
simple and *correct*.  Other people wanted the nicer names.  Maxim's
conversion gets that correct.  Please copy it.

If your tool isn't sure what to do, use human intervention.  For example,
make up a heuristic, and check that exhaustively.  We have only one repo
to convert!

And people do *not* have the same email address for the whole lifetime
of the repo.  This would mean I can never again contribute to GCC if I
start using a different email address after the conversion!


Segher