Re: [boost] Git Modularization Review no vote heads-up

Subject: Re: [boost] Git Modularization Review no vote heads-up
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-05-23 01:28:55

on Wed May 22 2013, Jürgen Hunold <jhunold-AT-gmx.eu> wrote:

> But this can easily be done after the conversion.
>
> I think we already lost too much time with failed rewrite attempts, so let us 
> get a working repository first. Then Volodya can test git mv v2/* . and report 
> results. Afterwards, we can always try rewriting in a separate clone.

Rewriting _published_ history is most strongly discouraged by the Git
people, for several good reasons.  *If* there is to be any
rearrangement, it should happen before the switchover, so it doesn't
bork people who are doing work based on the history originally
published.

However, I am loath to do any rearrangement that doesn't (reasonably)
faithfully reflect how things were set up in the past.  Otherwise,
someone will check out an old state of the super-module and find that
things have the wrong path relationships.  Of course, path relationships
will not match SVN anyway (because we don't have a modular layout in
SVN), but people on this list made it quite clear that modularizing
history was important to them, so I presume they want the Git history to
reflect reality with maximal fidelity.

That said, if the consensus is that things should be rearranged in the
build repository, we can do that.  We just need clear and explicit
instructions that cover what to do with *all* the paths that have been
used in Boost.Build (including branches and tags) throughout time.  As
you can see from
https://github.com/ryppl/Boost2Git/blob/master/repositories.txt#L2261
and following lines, just preserving the existing structure was
nontrivial.

-- 
Dave Abrahams