Re: New spin of repository conversion

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

"Bastian Märkisch" <bma...@we...>:
> Thank you for the new version.  Overall the attribution algorithm
> seems to work remarkably well! There are a number of cases though
> were it fails. 
> 
> Here's an example (picked more or less randomly):
> https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/git-main/ci/26f769db9e954052b11dbc8f242fc35a3cfd6880/
> This one is attributed to Ethan, although the change is by me.
> The reason seems to be that the Changelog entry is inserted below
> an entry by Ethan on the same day.  I think that is not an uncommon
> case, in fact I quickly found around a dozen such cases.  Can this
> be taken into account or do we have to check manually?

Inserting an entry *below* the previous one defeats my naive algorithm, which
simply assumed that the topmost entry in the ChangeLog is the most recent and
most relevant one.

I'm open to suggestions about a better algorithm, but...if it's not to assume
that the topmost entry is the right one, what rule should be used?  Under
what circumstances do attributions get inserted below that?

You may have to fix these manually.

> Another idea concerning the CVS conversion:  at the early stages of
> the gnuplot CVS repo, files were moved from the top directory to 
> sub-directories. That is they were deleted and added to CVS again. 
> Hence the history before the move is kind of lost.  While not super
> important, I wonder if this could be easily ammended now?

Can you be more specific about the time this happened, and in what way the
git conversion fails to reflect the old history?

The way cvs-fast-export works *may* already solve this problem.  It scans
masters in the attic directory - it has to,  because that's where deleted
files go. In fact attic files are treated pretty much as though they were
at their original, pre-attic locations, so if a commit clique is found by
matching time and comment it does not matter that some of the file
revisions are in the attic and some are not.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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