On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Harvey Harrison wrote: > > If anyone recalls my report was something along the lines of > git gc --aggressive explodes pack size. Yes, --aggressive is generally a bad idea. I think we should remove it or at least fix it. It doesn't do what the name implies, because it actually throws away potentially good packing, and re-does it all from a clean slate. That said, it's totally pointless for a person who isn't a git proponent to do an initial import, and in that sense I agree with Daniel: he shouldn't waste his time with tools that he doesn't know or care about, since there are people who *can* do a better job, and who know what they are doing, and understand and like the tool. While you can do a half-assed job with just mindlessly running "git svnimport" (which is deprecated these days) or "git svn clone" (better), the fact is, to do a *good* import does likely mean spending some effort on it. Trying to make the user names / emails to be better with a mailmap, for example. [ By default, for example, "git svn clone/fetch" seems to create those horrible fake email addresses that contain the ID of the SVN repo in each commit - I'm not talking about the "git-svn-id", I'm talking about the "user@hex-string-goes-here" thing for the author. Maybe people don't really care, but isn't that ugly as hell? I'd think it's worth it doing a really nice import, spending some effort on it. But maybe those things come from the older CVS->SVN import, I don't really know. I've done a few SVN imports, but I've done them just for stuff where I didn't want to touch SVN, but just wanted to track some project like libgpod. For things like *that*, a totally mindless "git svn" thing is fine ] Of course, that does require there to be git people in the gcc crowd who are motivated enough to do the proper import and then make sure it's up-to-date and hosted somewhere. If those people don't exist, I'm not sure there's much idea to it. The point being, you cannot ask a non-git person to do a major git import for an actual switch-over. Yes, it *can* be as simple as just doing a git svn clone --stdlayout svn://svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc gcc but the fact remains, you want to spend more effort and expertise on it if you actually want the result to be used as a basis for future work (as opposed to just tracking somebody elses SVN tree). That includes: - do the historic import with good packing (and no, "--aggressive" is not it, never mind the misleading name and man-page) - probably mailmap entries, certainly spending some time validating the results. - hosting it and perhaps most importantly - helping people who are *not* git users get up to speed. because doing a good job at it is like asking a CVS newbie to set up a branch in CVS. I'm sure you can do it from man-pages, but I'm also sure you sure as hell won't like the end result. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
