Re: git am from scratch

On Thursday, 19 March 2009 21:18:17 Jeff King wrote:

I don't think this has ever worked in any version of git.

I did find a way to help myself in the end. Still it was still a major, 
unnecessary annoyance.

I ran into this problem when trying to reconstruct a project's history (after 
going RCS -> CVS -> git many things were still wrong like unrelated RCS files 
which ended up in the history, RCS files being moved to the Attic in the 
original tree to indicate deletes [which means they will happily live on from 
a CVS point of view], etc.).

The easiest way I could find how to get rid of all the mess without going 
totally insane was to git-format-patch the repository, fix up the major 
things in the mbox, and then recreate the history.

In the end I ended up preparing the initial commit by hand followed 
by "commit -c HASH" to preserve the metadata. (The cvsimport branch had a 
different commit at its tip, so I couldn't use commit --amend on that.) After 
that, I git-am'ed the rest of the mbox onto that reconstructed commit. This 
could have been significantly easier.

There are many other ways to do this.

That's really not the point. Thanks though.

Andreas