Re: Goals for repo conversion day

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

>>>>> On Mon, 27 Jan 2014, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>:
>> There is one more thing in the history that may be worth fixing,
>> though it may lead to quite a bit of manual work. Before emacs
>> switched to CVS the sources were kept in RCS, and files were
>> deleted by renaming the RCS file prefixing its name with "=" (to
>> keep the history, since RCS doesn't have the concept of an attic
>> like CVS). The obstacle is that there is no record of this deletion
>> except in the ChangeLog file, and at that time the ChangeLog files
>> weren't kept in RCS (they were versioned by numbered backups only).
>> So in order to find the exact point in time when the file has been
>> deleted for real one would have to grep the ChangeLog file for
>> mentioning the deletion and look up the surrounding text in the
>> commit log. For example, the file lisp/speedbspec.el only exists as
>> lisp/=speedbspec.el in the current history, added in commit
>> 73bf48f. The next mentioning of the string "speedbspec.el" was in
>> commit ab18f00, which corresponds to the point where the file was
>> deleted. The corresponding changelog file (lisp/ChangeLog.7) has
>> this entry:
>>
>> 1998-07-10  Eric M. Ludlam  <zappo@ultranet.com>
>> 
>>         * speedbspec.el: Deleted; now integrated into speedbar.el.
>>         * speedbar.el: More commentary.
>>
>> Note that the first line of the entry isn't mentioned in commit
>> ab18f00, but we now know that the file was deleted here. The next
>> commit touching this file is 1c3e7fb with the message "properly
>> mark Attic files as deleted", where the file was finally deleted
>> from the tree.

> Yuck.

> Fortunately, I have a search primitive that will find all these
> instances.

So, this will take care of deleted files. However, I wonder how
renaming of files was handled in pre-CVS times? My guess would be that
the RCS file would have been renamed. How could one find out if and
when this happened?

Ulrich