Bazaar references complicate the git transition

[Eric S. Raymond]

This is particularly a heads-up for RMS and Andreas.

I missed something on my first pass through the git mirror that I
shouldn't have.  Some commit comments have Bazaar local revision
numbers in them referring to other commits.  (It is possible
others have full hashes in them; I haven't looked closely enough at
everything yet to be sure.)

Left uncorrected, this would be bad.  Those revision numbers 
will become meaningless after the git transition. Information about
which commits refer to which others would be lost.  This would be 
particularly unfortunate with respect to reversion and correction
commits.

The good news: in reposurgeon, I have a good tool for quickly finding
and moving these to VCS-independent forms.  It's a VCS history editor
which does just about everything you could imagine such a tool
doing. It can take in RCS, CVS, Subversion, hg, bzr, and git
repositories; it can emit all of those except CVS (Subversion output
is alpha-stage).

The bad news: when reposurgeon edits a commit comment, all hashes of
its descendants are (necessarily) altered.  This means, in practice, 
that the reqired modifications cannot be done in situ on the 
Savannah repo.

Here's how the procedure will need to go:

1. Commits to bzr and git repos are temporarily closed.

2. I clone the Savannah git repo.

3. I signal for a reset of the Savannah git repo to empty.

4. I apply a pre-built reposurgeon script fixing the references.

5. I push the altered repo to the empty repo on Savannah.

6. Commits are opened again.  (The commit-mirroring from bzr
   will not care that the git repo has been altered.)

Step 4 will only take a few minutes (I'll build the modification
script ahead of time).  The problem that is the steps around that
require going through Savannah's admins, who (a) don't have procedures
for this sort of thing, and (b) are often difficult to reach and get a
response from.

That's why I think this needs an RMS intervention.

The two pain points are: (a) blocking/unblocking repo access, and
(b) resetting the repo to empty. We need a way to push those buttons,
either through a web interface or through an admin paying attention.

In the ideal case, Andreas and I would pick a date and time, then
at that time join an IRC chat with a Savannah admin who has been 
pre-briefed and knows what to do. The whole process should not take
more than 30 minutes.

Note: this needs to happen *before* the release tags are cryptosigned,
beacause of the hash invalidations.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest,
law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself
worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government
is the master, not the servant, of the people.
        -- Jeff Snyder