Re: Weird shallow-tree conversion state, and branches of shallow trees

On 4/15/07, Shawn O. Pearce [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

The tree that goes out to users is NOT git or CVS. What you point to
here is impossible unless we forced all of the users to migrate to git
(a truly herculean task if there was ever one).
It's a tarball or an rsync of an automatically managed CVS checkout.
(Tarballs go onto the release media, and are also widely used by those
that sneaker-net their trees to machines for security reasons).
Alternatively, the users browse the viewcvs, and pull something from the
Attic. Regardless of where they get the file from, the problem is that
the file doesn't contain any markers to help the developers merge it
back again.

Git won't do this for you.  We specifically don't mangle source[*1*].

What you could do is create a program that mangles the files before
delivery.  You would probably want to do something like:

  $Id: 7fbf239:path/to/file$

where 7fbf239 is the earliest commit that introduced that particular
version of path/to/file, even if that is months old.  That would
be most like what CVS would do.  8 char abbreviated commits should
be reasonably stable, and not too long to read or copy and paste.
A format like the above would also be easy to grab and copy into
a Git command line.

If we had a Git library that could access the repository, this would
a pretty easy program to write.  You are basically blaming each path
in the current HEAD commit on the parent, until you cannot blame
anyone else for that path.  You do this blame on the entire tree,
and then output the munged structure (or only the files you want
munged).

Its good we have a GSoC project working on libification!  ;-)

[*1*] Yes, I'm ignoring the nutso crlf support that's now in...  Even
      though I work on Windows, the only true line ending is LF.  ;-)

Can we add an attribute like Subversion's svn:keywords? If the
attribute is set, we expand keywords when checkout and remove
expansion in memory before doing any git operations. It's some kind of
I/O filter for working directory access.

-- 
Duy