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

[Eric S. R. <es...@th...>]

Mojca Miklavec <moj...@gm...>:
> On 9 October 2017 at 05:46, sfeam via gnuplot-beta wrote:
> >
> > I have a question though.
> > We have a much longer list of contributors (as opposed to committers) because
> > the project workflow historically had a large number of contributors funneling
> > contributions through a small number of people with cvs commit privilege.
> >
> > I found 168 unique contributors listed in the ChangeLog files,
> > compared to the 14 committers in your list above.
> > Will the names of the true contributors be lost in the conversion process?
> > That would be sad.
> 
> They are actually "lost" is CVS already, while they are (and will)
> still (be) in ChangeLog.

That is correct.

> What one *can* do with cvs2git conversion is to start with something
> that looks like a reasonable conversion already and then make a map
> 
>     <commit-shasum> <author>
> 
> for all commits where the author doesn't match the committer. Then one
> can run a script that changes the author of each individual commit.

My tools can do something similar.  The problem is making that map.
Somebody would have to grovel through every single change file making
a list of entries of the form

<date> <author> <files>

Possibly a script could be written to do this.  I'd then have to write a Python
extension of reposurgeon that would walk through the commit list looking for
an exact match of file list and a rough match of date - as I previously
noted, CVS dates aren't reliable.

> PS: w.r.t. the question of what could go wrong with my conversion,
> this is what the "git cvsimport" complains about:

The git maintainers' conversion engine is seriously buggy and should
not be trusted on any repository with a nontrivial branch structure.

I've tried to get them to use cvs-fast-export, but there's an incremental-
conversion feature they're attached to that their engine pretends to do.
They're attached to the pretense and are willing to accept buggy conversions
to get it.

Yes, this is infuriating.
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