Re: Update on the branch surgery

[Hans-Bernhard B. <HBB...@t-...>]

Am 27.10.2017 um 10:56 schrieb Daniel J Sebald:
> On 10/26/2017 08:35 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> I've made quite a bit of progress without having to resort to a script 
> file.  qgit has this nice feature in which one can select a file and it 
> will list all the changesets that have happened for that particular file 
> rather than everything changing in the repository.  

I have my doubts that information about how things _should_ look can 
meaningfully be gained from looking at the current output of the 
conversion script.  That information really must be found directly in 
the _input_, i.e. in the CVS repository.

Our repository is, as far as I know, almost free of actual defects or 
corruptions.  The only real hickup is that there's a directory inside an 
"Attic", which probably shouldn't exist.  CVS itself can still retrieve 
every tagged version I tried, and the results looked quite sane.

Branch information is right there in the RCS-style archive files, and/or 
in the "cvs log" of each file (even dropped members), if you know what 
to look for.  E.g. if you want to know what happened to the instance of 
version.c that lived directly in the root, you can go to any CVS sandbox 
and ask for "cvs log version.c", even though "version.c" has long since 
moved into "src".

> I've gone back to the CVS repository, no git conversion, and there 
> simply is no version of alloc.c that has an RCSid of
> 
> static char *RCSid = "$Id: alloc.c,v 1.11 1997/04/10 02:32:39 drd Exp

That's the content of this line in the original commit, i.e. it was put 
in there before the beginning of the CVS repository at SF.  You 
shouldn't assign it any meaning.

> That drd RCSid (and a lot of the copyright notices...no wonder they are 
> going backward from 1999 to 1998) must be coming from prior to the start 
> of this CVS.  

FWIW, "drd" is Dave Denholm, who was the maintainer before Lars Hecking, 
and before we started using SF.net.  And yes, at least Dave, and 
possibly Lars, too, did run their own CVS behind closed doors.