Re: Bazaar references complicate the git transition

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

esr@thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

> This is particularly a heads-up for RMS and Andreas.
>
> I missed something on my first pass through the git mirror that I
> shouldn't have.  Some commit comments have Bazaar local revision
> numbers in them referring to other commits.  (It is possible
> others have full hashes in them; I haven't looked closely enough at
> everything yet to be sure.)
>
> Left uncorrected, this would be bad.  Those revision numbers 
> will become meaningless after the git transition. Information about
> which commits refer to which others would be lost.  This would be 
> particularly unfortunate with respect to reversion and correction
> commits.
>
> The good news: in reposurgeon, I have a good tool for quickly finding
> and moving these to VCS-independent forms.  It's a VCS history editor
> which does just about everything you could imagine such a tool
> doing. It can take in RCS, CVS, Subversion, hg, bzr, and git
> repositories; it can emit all of those except CVS (Subversion output
> is alpha-stage).
>
> The bad news: when reposurgeon edits a commit comment, all hashes of
> its descendants are (necessarily) altered.  This means, in practice, 
> that the reqired modifications cannot be done in situ on the 
> Savannah repo.

Would it be an option to leave the original commits unchanged but add a
"note" to it containing the git commit id?

On the other hand, rewriting the history is a one-time cost.  It will,
for a while, double the repository size for preexisting git repo users
(until the dangling references get garbage collected three or four
months later).  And it will be a nuisance for any local branches.

-- 
David Kastrup