Re: It's not yet time to anoint git, or anything else

[David Kastrup]

Romain Francoise <address@hidden> writes:

> "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> It is not yet time to anoint git (or anything else) as a winner,
>> even by implication.  We will need to carefully consider the
>> strengths and weaknesses of each of these systems in relation to
>> the specific needs of the Emacs project.
>
> An important aspect for us is how well the system is supported on
> Savannah.  Git has an advantage here because we already have an
> official Git repo of Emacs on Savannah, with complete history dating
> back to 1985.  We just have to make it read-write.
>
>    http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=emacs.git

I think that Miles' merge-commits should also be parsed from the log and
used as input data for git-filter-branch --parent-filter.  Once that is
done, git should be able to track all modification history to its
original source, even though we never had this information in CVS in the
first place.

This is one of the strongest points of gits in my opinion: it keeps only
a set of snapshots and a minimal ancestry graph (namely the parent
commits for each commit) for the commit history.  All the rest is
reconstructed on-demand.

And since we don't actually have this original data in our CVS archive,
git's ability to reconstruct this (which includes tracking the crutches
we have to use in lieu of file renames in CVS) is quite attractive.

-- 
David Kastrup