The Story
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My project, "L", has two branches "L1" and "L2". It was developed as L1 for a long period, then a branch, L2, was made and further development done on that. Since the branch there has been further development on L1.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H
\
J-K-L-M
(That's supposed to show J branching off D. I'm writing this with proportional spacing so it may look different on receipt)
The Reality
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L was developed in CVS as its trunk. That is what I am now referring to as L1.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H
At some point a snapshot was taken and put into Subversion. That is what I am now referring to as L2.
It is either
D-J-K-L-M
Or, more likely, just
J-K-L-M
(If some work was done on the snapshot before it was used to start the new project in SVN, which I think it was)
L2 has been converted to git using git's built-in Subversion handling.
I have a backup of the CVS repository for L1 and I can easily convert it to git using cvs2git.
What I would like to do is to merge these two branches into a single git repo. Specifically, to insert L1 into the existing git repo which is currently only L2.
(The subversion server no longer exists, and I don't have easy access to the repository backup, and there may have been work done since the import. I have a full backup of the CVS repository and I can easily convert it to git using cvs2git, with any extra parameters required.)
I've read up on merging repositories and I can easily get L1 into the same repo as L2, as a separate line of development. However, merging it is not the right thing to do, as that leaves me with L1 and L2 having separate starting points, with a merge leading to there being only one head. That's the opposite of what I want - I want to keep one starting point (that of L1), and branch L2 off it (with L2 ending up as master).
cvs2git works by generating fast-import scripts, so I can intercept the result of that and edit the import scripts if necessary. I can even dump L2 and rebuild everything using fast-import if that's the best option. Maybe L2 needs to be imported into L1 after generating a tag in L1 to indicate where the branch happens? That seems to be a more complex work-flow for this task - I would hope to be able to do minor manipulations of branches and only one fast-import (ie L1).
So, I'm still looking to see if I can find any other way of wrangling branches to make this happen, but I'd appreciate anyone else's advice on how to achieve my merger.
Regards,
Richard.
