RFC: Do we want the entire commit history to be pushed if code is moved to another repository?

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 7:20 PM, Frank Reininghaus
<frank78ac at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> when kdelibs was split into the different frameworks repositories, the
> git history was dropped. I think that this was a good idea - splitting
> the history properly would have been an extremely complex task, and
> everyone who wants to do source code archaelogy can just look at the
> kdelibs history after all.
>
> However, it seems that people follow a different approach now when
> code is moved to a different repository - the entire history of the
> code is being re-pushed to the new repository.
>
> Examples of this are the move of the about kioslave to kde-baseapps (I
> noticed it this morning because of all the commit emails I got, many
> of which are 1-line changes from 2006), and the recent move of
> kpasswdserver to kio [1].

Just as a quick note, people performing such moves should always talk
to sysadmin, irregardless of whether the hooks would allow such moves
or not. We can disable those notifications temporarily, which can
avoid trauma such as this - be aware that such pushes can also disrupt
Bugzilla, Reviewboard, etc.

>
> This is inconsistent with the kdelibs approach, and I see several
> reasons not to do it:
>
> 1. It makes using tools like git log, qgit or gitk for browsing the
> recent history extremely painful if lots of 10-year old commits are
> shown on top.
>
> 2. People who receive commit notification e-mails for a repository get
> lots of noise in their inbox.
>
> OTOH, the only reason to push all those old commits to the new
> repository would be to make browsing the history easier, but as the
> kdelibs splitting approach shows, this can also be done in another
> way.
>
>
> I would like to suggest the following approach for situations like
> this in the future:
>
> If code is moved to a new repository, then the current state of the
> corresponding directory from repo A is pushed to repo B in a single
> commit. The commit message should indicate how one can find out about
> the history of the code, i.e., which repository it is from, and what
> the commit hash is.
>
> Opinions?
>
> Thanks and best regards,
> Frank

Thanks,
Ben

>
> [1] I already asked about this in
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=139601591605309&w=2
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