[Kde-scm-interest] Sysadmin advice regarding Monolithic vs Split repositories.

[Ian Monroe]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Arno Rehn <kde at arnorehn.de> wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 September 2010 21:09:12 Ian Monroe wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Torgny Nyblom <kde at nyblom.org> wrote:
>> > I agree that this makes the most sense, but I wonder how the kdepim
>> > module(s) (and others?) should handle this with regards to preserving
>> > history in the conversion process.
>> >
>> > In the kdepim module(s) there has been (and are) a lot of files/subdirs
>> > moving between the different applications and libraries. Writing rules
>> > for all of these moves so that history is complete for all would be
>> > gits would be near impossible.
>>
>> Keeping lossless history is near impossible even with monolithic
>> repos, especially in the case of complicated repos like KDEPIM. Please
>> disabuse me if this problem is a solved issue.
>>
>> Even in trivial cases like Dragon Player moving to kdemultimedia from
>> kdereview and playground, svn2git isn't able to track. So if anything
>> multiple repos would aid in maintaining history. In general though a
>> lossless conversion seems impossible, and we should just be open to
>> keeping a copy of SVN around.
> Once we have svn2git rules for a monolithic repo, we can use git-filter-branch
> to split off individual subdirectories. AFAIK (I might be wrong) this would
> still keep all of the history of the affected files, even with all the moves.
> We'd need less complicated svn2git rules but still have seperate git repos.
>
> Found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359424/detach-subdirectory-
> into-separate-git-repository

AFAIK, its impossible to have svn2git rules for a monolithic repo like
KDE Multimedia with submodules like Dragon Player produce complete
history. So I think we are misunderstanding each other?

It's likely possible to create a complete history (meaning, a separate
git commit for every SVN commit) for Dragon Player once its treated as
a separate repo by svn2git. And therefore Torgny Nyblom's concerns
about splitting making history-completeness worse are misplaced.

(note that I'm not arguing that its a necessity to have complete
history, I'm OK with only having the history of dragon player since it
moved to kdemultimedia).

Ian