Re: Goals for repo conversion day

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

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.
> 
> Andreas.

Yuck.

Fortunately, I have a search primitive that will find all these instances.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>