Re: Goals for repo conversion day

[Eric S. Raymond]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden>:
>    (a) Seamless history browsing.
> 
> This is false fruit.  Archeologists LIKE the seams.

That is true.  But beware of misleading analogies!  Archeologists like
the seams mainly because stratigraphy helps them date things.  This is a problem
historians looking through a version-control repository won't have.

>                                                     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).

We will have a decent map.  Whether anyone cares enough to build those
tools is another question.

> If these can be achieved w/o undue repo futzing, that would be best.

I intend to publish the conversion script here for review well before
it is applied; you will be able to judge for yourself whether it is
"undue", and suggest improvements.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

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