Re: git repository with fixed history ready

[Patrick McCarty]

On 2010-03-22, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> 
> I've taken another look at fixing lily's history this weekend,
> it should be ready now to replace our old broken repository,
> have a look at the result
> 
>     git clone http://lilypond.org/people/janneke/vc/hysterical-lily.git

Wow, this is very awesome!  That must have been a tremendous effort.  :)

Just a side note:  cloning over HTTP by default is really inefficient
right now, so the download size of the above repo is ~900MB.  After
running `git gc --aggressive', the repo shrinks to the normal size
(~120MB).

> Our current GIT archive suffers from major problems in the
> CVS->GIT conversion, and also at the time of CVS conversion
> (looong ago), so if you go further back than release 1.5.49,
> you get eventually into some sort of crappy cycles like
> 
>     3114c9b lilypond-0.0.1
>     673ae03 lilypond-0.0.9
>     3d9b7e6 lilypond-0.0.1
>     27058a7 lilypond-0.0.1
>     f5a68ac lilypond-0.0.1
>     0292bf9 lilypond-0.0.1
>     1c3b8de flower-1.0.18
>     8e98b32 flower-1.0.2
>     f53fdff lilypond-0.0.1

Yeah, I've noticed that.  The new repo looks much better.

> The new archive fixes this and has a smooth history line
> all down to
> 
>     $ git log --abbrev-commit --pretty=oneline | tail
>     a7cbcf7 release: 0.0.3
>     8f9609a release: 0.0.2
>     f9ae673 release: 0.0.1
>     fc51c93 Initial.
> 
> it contains all stable branches and tags and also fixes/
> unifies some weird email addresses from the CVS and pre-CVS
> era.  It is up-to date as of yesterday evening (6510c4a).

This is mostly true.  There are still some random commits that have
CVS-style usernames.  For example, in the new repo,

  $ git show bc86bf

displays

  commit bc86bf019ae3d2f03c12e8b52527bd5eb48283f3
  Author: jneem <jneem>
  Date:   Thu Aug 10 05:53:53 2006 +0000

      convert-ly the user manual


But, overall, there are relatively few of these cases.  Most of them
have been fixed.

> There's one small problem with replacing the old repository,
> *all* committishes change, and everyone will have to make
> a fresh clone, and any work based on the old repository
> must be copied over to the new clone using git format-patch
> and git am.

I'm generally okay with this.  Of course, it would be optimal to fix
only the "pre-Git" part of LilyPond's history, but I imagine that
would take a lot of work.

Thanks a lot, Jan.  This will be incredibly helpful for the Ohloh
project page, too.

-Patrick