Re: Let's clean up the recent stuff and hide old messy stuff under a rug

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

sfeam <sf...@us...>:
> On Sunday, 29 October 2017 14:01:15 Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> > I've experimented with something called cvs2git, which I believe does a 
> > pretty good job of constructing branches and merges, but has some 
> > drawbacks. 
> 
> I think we are past the stage of looking for alternative conversion utilities.
> 
> Can't we just flatten everything prior to version 4.0 into a baseline
> snapshot that is the root for everything subsequent to that?

We don't have to be quite that drastic.  In particular, we can keep the
archival releases you wanted glued to the tail without causing further
difficulties.

I do think we have readhed the point where it makes sense to just drop
the 3.7.x branch and move forward.

> I really don't see why anyone will ever need to modify or branch from
> anything prior to 4.0.  The tarballs are good enough for historical 
> reference.  I just don't see why anyone would care about the branch
> structure of 3.4/3.5/3.7/3.8 now that it's 20 years done and over.
> 
> And if someone _does_ want the historical information for some reason
> other than development going forward, they would do better to go back to
> the archived cvs repository itself rather than having to deal with any
> post-processing layers you might add now to make the cvs->git conversion
> work.

I concur.

> I suggest that at this point the only issue worth spending more time
> on is authorship attributions transferred from the ChangeLog series.
> Once that is sorted out, let's call it a wrap.

Well, filling in at least the wore recent empty log messages would be
good too.  But other than that, yes.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org
Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own.