Re: Update on the branch surgery

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

On 10/27/2017 03:09 PM, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
> 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.

It's actually pretty good.  The diffs (i.e., changes between versions) 
all seem logical according to the messages.


> 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.

Yes, they look good.  I too have done enough retrieving of files.


> 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's where the problem lies and it propagates through the master 
branch up until just after 3.7.x at which point the mass movement of 
files sort of corrected the issue.  We have to put that pre-CVS code in 
sync with the start of the CVS repo.  The master branch is constructed 
from diffs, so slight differences at the start get propagated.


>> 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.

Do you think there is an old CVS repo from Dave Denholm about somewhere? 
  We don't need it, but it would be interesting if to look at.

Dan