Re: Goals for repo conversion day

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>
() Sat, 25 Jan 2014 09:06:38 -0500

   (a) Seamless history browsing.

This is false fruit.  Archeologists LIKE the seams.  Smoothing the repo
(possible) but not the external references into the repo (impossible) is
at best a half-assed "solution", at worst a ridiculous and never-ending
font of WOMBAT laments.  I think the best we can hope for is a decent
map (and of course nice Emacs-based tools for grokking it in full :-D).

   (b) Information preservation for any future move to another VCS.

   (c) Cryptosigning so that future release integrity is protected and
   historical release reconstructions can be trusted (that is, assuming
   we don't believe the code history has already been corrupted).

   (d) Avoidance of metadata representations that are easily stripped or
   scrambled if someone gets momentarily forgetful in the future.

If these can be achieved w/o undue repo futzing, that would be best.  We
will have a repo that is (permanently) ugly up to the point where (going
forward) we begin to maintain it more beautifully, but that's just fine.
In the long run, ugly truth is better than pretty lies.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
   GPG key: 4C807502
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