Re: A plea for volunteers (Fwd: CVS support at SourceForge ends Nov. 30)

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 10/07/2017 02:25 PM, Achim Gratz wrote:
> sfeam via gnuplot-beta writes:
>> Well guys, it's been fun.
>>
>> SourceForge has announced that they will shut down CVS support next month.
>> I have little time available to deal with this, and minimal prior experience with git.
>>
>> So I am making a plea for a  volunteer to step up and transfer the project files
>> to some git repository.
> 
> There's already an unofficial repository (not that I'd endorse GitHub):
> https://github.com/gnuplot/gnuplot
> 
> As noted on that page, this uses cvsimport to do the mirroring, which
> sometimes produces somewhat strange commits on the Git side.  You might
> want to get in touch with Eric S. Raymond if you want the CVS repo
> cleaned and converted with some more care into Git (he's done that
> before for other projects).

I did

mkdir temp_repository; cd temp_repository
git clone https://github.com/gnuplot/gnuplot.git
cd gnuplot
gitg

and things look reasonable as far as change history, tags and branches.

Can you point to some examples of strange commits in this record to give 
us an idea?

I'm wondering now about my suggestion of putting all the ChangeLog files 
into a changelog comment so that it can be included in the

git log

command.  The reason is that there are, in fact, entries for all the 
changesets (where they came from, I don't know, they don't exactly match 
the ChangeLog).  So mixing those in with the equivalent ChangeLog 
comment might create a confusing duplication.  Let's compare an example. 
  The first in the list (via "git log") is

commit 0a3035e39a1f9402a474d0ea9300deac4cd9ef33
Author: broxxxx <broxxxx>
Date:   Fri Oct 6 18:35:09 2017 +0000

     Use <sys/wait.h> if available.
     Provide centralized fall-back of WEXITSTATUS if <sys/wait.h> does 
not supply it.

whose changed files (via gitg) are

▶15	ChangeLog
▶4	configure.ac
▶6	src/command.c
▶20	src/syscfg.h

While the entry in ChangeLog is as follows (I put 'x' in for email 
address to keep out of the content):

2017-10-06  xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx  <xx...@xx...>

	* src/command.c: Move WEXITSTATUS fall-back definition away from here.

	* src/syscfg.h: Include <sys/wait.h>, if it exists.
	(WEXITSTATUS): Provide fall-back definition, if none in
	<sys/wait.h>.  Move MS Windows specific replacement from command.c
	to here.

	* configure.ac: Add call to AC_HEADER_SYS_WAIT

Moving forward, the changeset comments should look more like the second 
example from the ChangeLog, as that highlights nicely in vi-based pagers.

Currently in the translated repository, there are but a few users making 
commits.  Going forward, the names of the user who creates the original 
changeset will end up in that Author location even though one of the 
maintainers pushes the changes to the repository when ready.  (That name 
is a configuration parameter in a person's OS account via the hidden 
file .gitconfig)

Dan