Re: [boost] [conversion] Isolating the phantom file changes problem

Subject: Re: [boost] [conversion] Isolating the phantom file changes problem
From: Jürgen Hunold (jhunold_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-11-27 10:32:37

Hi Beman,

On Wednesday, 27. November 2013 09:25:19 Beman Dawes wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 2:00 AM, Daniel James <daniel_at_[hidden]>wrote:
> > 
> > Changing subversion properties doesn't fix historical data, so it
> > won't fix anything that we can't fix in git.
> 
> That's also my understanding.

Yes, this is right.
 
> > The conversion doesn't respect .gitattributes, that's why there's a
> > problem. We can fix these issues in current and future versions by
> > normalizing the files (as described in the gitattributes man page).

Ah, "normalizing" is the keyword I am missing. Thanks.

> After doing a lot of reading of git docs and about how others dealt with
> similar problems, that was also my conclusion. I'm wondering why others
> haven't suggested renormalization?

I'm still more familiar with Subversion than git. Fixing it on the svn side 
would be my personal favourite. I did some similar conversions on while 
converting from CVS years ago in order to end up with a "clean" repository 
without need for further actions. But cvs2svn/git is a scary thing...

> Since we can't fix these files in historical versions we could re-run
> 
> > the conversion with gitattributes that unsets the text attribute for
> > the problematic files (something like "*.bat -text", "*.vsproj -text",
> > "*.svg -text"). Then in git update the gitattributes (to something
> > like "*.bat text eol=crlf", "*.vsproj text eol=crlf", "*.svg text")
> > and normalize the files so that it does what we want. We can script
> > that, so it shouldn't require too much work.
> 
> As long as we are sure the .gitattributes are correct, and then
> renormalize, why do we have to rerun the conversion at all? What am I
> missing?

My goal was to avoid any "conversion" commits. I should have explicitly said 
so. I'm fine with having a handful of "normalizing" commits and let the 
repository go live. 

>From the replies I think there is consensus (or at least a great majority) to 
renormalize and move forward.

Thanks for managing this whole thing so patiently.

Yours,

Jürgen
-- 
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