[Kde-scm-interest] Fixing the plasma-desktop and plasma-workspace repositories

[Eike Hein]

Hi,

a while ago kde-workspace got split into plasma-desktop and plasma-
workspace, along with some other moves into those repositories.

In the course of this our repositories effectively lost history, in
that this split was unfortunately done in a way that the resulting
repositories that we actually use don't have history going beyond
the split date for the code they contain.

I think this is far below the standard of the original git migra-
tion, where major effort was spent on preserving history, doing
all the necessary move tracking in SVN to filter things out
correctly. Preserving history is the very reason we use version
control, and simply throwing out history is - I'm not quite sure
how this could happen.

It's repeatedly been a practical problem for me now - three times
this week I've wanted to look at commits prior to the split date
for reference, or include references to kde-workspace.git in commit
messages to compensate for this.

It's possible to fix this locally with grafts, but not server-side
since grafts aren't part of the git protocol.

I'd like to propose that we try to fix this by redoing the splits
correctly and replaying the new history on top of the result. This
means effectively doing a force push to public repositories in the
end, but I think the consequences would eventually weigh less than
the loss of history. It'd certainly need some sort of grace period
and announcement schedule though, and it'd probably best to delay
it until after the first Plasma 5 release or even the first bugfix
release.

Thoughts and opinions?

(I'm explicitly CC'ing Aleix and Nicolás here, since Aleix is the
name tag on the split/import commit and Nicolás has lots of ex-
perience with doing this stuff correctly.)


Cheers,
Eike