Re: [boost] [git] neglected aspects

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] neglected aspects
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-02 10:35:09

on Fri Mar 02 2012, Julian Gonggrijp <j.gonggrijp-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> Dave Abrahams wrote:
>
>> And the process of making that possible is already underway:
>> https://github.com/ryppl/boost-svn
>
> Thanks for pointing to the ryppl account on github. It raised some 
> questions for me:
>
> 1. There are two git versions of the Boost tree in there, boost-svn 
> and boost-history, which to my uninformed eye seem to be doing the 
> same thing. boost-svn is a "live mirror" of the Boost svn repository 
> while boost-history is a "faithful conversion" of the Boost svn 
> repository. Apart from the fact that boost-svn has more branches than 
> boost-history and that boost-history seems to be updated less often, 
> I see no difference. Why do these two git repositories exist in 
> parallel?
>
> 2. Again to my uninformed eye, all those branches of boost-svn look a 
> bit disorganised. Wouldn't it need some cleaning and reorganising 
> either shortly before or shortly after the switch? Or is that perhaps 
> exactly the purpose of boost-history?

I'm going to leave the definitive answer to John Wiegley, who is doing
the conversion, but I think it's like this:

    boost-svn is being generated by the "traditional" git-svn tool.  The
    results of git-svn are, however, not adequate for correctly
    preserving Boost's history

    boost-history is being generated by
    https://github.com/jwiegley/subconvert, a tool John wrote to do a
    "faithful" conversion.

If you want to know the precise differences between the two, John will
have to explain them to you... but if you look at the former repository
you can find lots of spurious-looking branches, e.g. "trunk_at_38326,"
"trunk_at_38328," etc.  So I wouldn't be concerned by the smaller number of
branches in the latter mirror.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com