Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[John Wiegley]

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

> On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 00:08 -0500, John Wiegley wrote:
> > 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
> commit IDs back.

This just needs to be reverted:

    git revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

Thanks,
  John

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Junio C Hamano]

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

> I've spoken to the author of this commit, Matthias Urlichs.  Here is an
> excerpt of our conversation:
>
>> On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 00:08 -0500, John Wiegley wrote:
>> > 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
>> commit IDs back.
>
> This just needs to be reverted:
>
>     git revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

That ancient commit does two things, and one thing that it claims to
do does not have anything to do with 32k limit.

Please send in a patch that exactly addresses the issue (it is
unclear if you want to keep or drop the removal of trailing
whitespaces that is done by that commit).  The proposed log message
needs to justify why breaking other people's repositories that were
converted by an ancient version of cvs2git is lessor of two evils
(the other one being logs longer than 32k are not kept for you).

Thanks.

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Thomas Adam]

On 6 June 2012 11:28, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've spoken to the author of this commit, Matthias Urlichs.  Here is an
> excerpt of our conversation:
>
>> On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 00:08 -0500, John Wiegley wrote:
>> > 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.

Don't be stupid with this.  Please.

-- Thomas Adam

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[John Wiegley]

>>>>> Thomas Adam <thomas@xteddy.org> writes:

> 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.
> 
> Don't be stupid with this.  Please.

My needs would be satisfied with an command-line option that removes the
limit, while keeping the status quo unaffected if it's not used.  How does
that sound?

John

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Michael Haggerty]

On 06/06/2012 07:54 PM, Thomas Adam wrote:
> On 6 June 2012 11:28, John Wiegley<jwiegley@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I've spoken to the author of this commit, Matthias Urlichs.  Here is an
>> excerpt of our conversation:
>>
>>> On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 00:08 -0500, John Wiegley wrote:
>>>> 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 current cvs2svn-based cvs2git script doesn't have any limitation on 
the size of log messages and doesn't clean up their whitespace.  The 
only things that it does, in the default configuration, is check that 
the message is ASCII (if not there are options to reencode it as UTF-8) 
and convert all EOL sequences into LF.

Therefore I don't believe that there is any reason to preserve the 
functionality of commit e371046b64 in the name of compatibility with 
cvs2git.

I have no opinion about whether it makes sense to revert/preserve the 
commit for other reasons.

Michael
(the cvs2svn/cvs2git maintainer)

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Junio C Hamano]

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> On 06/06/2012 07:54 PM, Thomas Adam wrote:
>> On 6 June 2012 11:28, John Wiegley<jwiegley@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> I've spoken to the author of this commit, Matthias Urlichs.  Here is an
>>> excerpt of our conversation:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, 2012-04-21 at 00:08 -0500, John Wiegley wrote:
>>>>> 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...

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Andreas Schwab]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> 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.

Only if the conversion is restarted from scratch.  Otherwise, any
existing converted commits are preserved due to the incremental nature
of git cvsimport.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Junio C Hamano]

Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> writes:

> Only if the conversion is restarted from scratch.

Yes, that was the use case I was the most worried about.

Often a re-import is one way to validate what you have (and worse
yet, what you based your recent work on), so unmatching commit
object names are red flags.

Re: Please revert e371046b6473907aa6d62b7862a3afe9d33561e1

[Andreas Schwab]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> writes:
>
>> Only if the conversion is restarted from scratch.
>
> Yes, that was the use case I was the most worried about.
>
> Often a re-import is one way to validate what you have (and worse
> yet, what you based your recent work on), so unmatching commit
> object names are red flags.

Given the notorious unreliability of cvsps that doesn't look like a very
serious change in comparison.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."