Re: Update on the branch surgery

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

Am 28.10.2017 um 01:01 schrieb Daniel J Sebald:
> On 10/27/2017 05:16 PM, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:

> Agreed.  This is a consequence of reposurgeon choosing to place that 
> 3.7.x branch somewhere other than the trunk at (what I believe should be)

More to the point, it's a consequence of reposurgeon's underlying 
cvs-fast-export struggling with the strange CVS concept of a "vendor 
branch", with less than total success.

> Lars created that branch, 1.1.1, near the start but didn't use it for 
> much, apparently.  The branch-master is based on 1.1:

Not really.  That's a vendor branch, and it was used exactly as 
intended: to track an upstream or "vendor" series of releases while 
maintaining local changes.  In our case the upstream source was Lars' 
own CVS repository, and this practice ended when Lars switched over to 
SourceForge as his primary repository, 6 tracked "vendor" releases later.

In a way, that vendor branch is still in use today, 19 years later: some 
of our demo files are still on that vendor branch; their current CVS 
revision is 1.1.1.1.

On the surface, vendor branches can be viewed as CVS's attempted at 
implementing a modern-day DVCS, i.e. "cvs import" is a much dumber 
ancestor of "git pull". Internally, their handling is quite probably the 
weirdest aspect of CVS by quite a some margin.

> I confirmed there are no comments "# HBB: revised etc." in the master 
> branch which matches Lars' CVS repo.

And that's the source of this problem: cvs-fast-export tries to brush 
what happens on vendor branches under the carpet, mostly pretending that 
entire branch is just a single initial commit.

But in our case that's the wrong thing to do. Our early project branches 
start at different points along the vendor branch, at least for some of 
the files.  So it cannot work to squash the vendor branch into a single 
commit.  Either one branch gets files that are older than they should 
be, or another branch gets files that are newer than they should be.