Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

Michael Haggerty [off-list ref] writes:

On 06/06/2012 07:54 PM, Thomas Adam wrote:

quoted

On 6 June 2012 11:28, John Wiegley[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

I've spoken to the author of this commit, Matthias Urlichs.  Here is an
excerpt of our conversation:

quoted

On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 00:08 -0500, John Wiegley wrote:

quoted

Just wanted to let you know that this bit me.  I have a client whose CVS
repository I'm converting to Git, and they have _many_ log messages that
are larger than 32k in size.

Feel free to submit a patch that reverts this. These days, there's probably
no user of cvs2git left, but at that time it was important to get the same

This assertion is not only wrong, it's just ludicrous.  The intended
functionality has a statement of intent with regards to its
functionality -- and as a user of cvs2git, I'd not want to lose *any*
of that functionality.

I was confused about this conversation.  The commit that John Wiegley
proposes to revert is from 2005.  The "cvs2git" functionality in
cvs2svn was not added until 2007.  So it must be that commit
e371046b64 was added for compatibility with some other cvs2git script
(i.e., not the one that is part of the cvs2svn project).  Nowadays the
only script called "cvs2git" that I ever see mentioned (and I maintain
a Google search on that string) is the one from the cvs2svn project.
So I assume that the old "cvs2git" script (the one mentioned in commit
e371046b64's log message) has died off.

The way I read the log message of e371046b64 is that the repository
resulting from the conversion without this patch will be different
for repositories that were originally converted by the older
cvs2git.  So my impression is that it does not matter if the older
tool died long time ago.  As long as repositories converted by it
still lives in the field, reverting the patch will start producing
different (and arguably more correct) results for people who are
using such a repository that started its life long time ago.

The potential negative impact is not huge for projects that used
cvsimport for a one-time converion, and further developments all
happen in git, of course...