[Debian-med-packaging] Git vs SVN

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

Steffen Möller asked in private mail how to handle moves from SVN to
Git.  I'd like to raise my point in public to let other people know my
opinion.

The question was, whether we should possibly indicate something like

 alioth/debian-med/packages/ball $ cat now_managed_via_git
 http://git.debian.org/?p=debian-med/ball.git;a=summary
 
as part of our policy.

In practice I have seen some files like this (not necessarily with this
exact name).  Considering the fact that it is good practice it should be
mentioned in policy.

Steffen also asked for the alternative to just remove those old ones?

I personally do not see a reason to remove the full history immediately.
However, inspired by previous "my SSD is great but small" arguments I
started removing old tags even in SVN (where "old" is defined as
something "we have at least three newer tags and there is nothing
special in the older ones" where "special" means something like
"released in stable release and might be useful for security fixes or
so") which can be restored via snapshots.d.o anyway.  So it might make
sense to remove stuff from SVN once we have seen some releases in Git.
A perfectly valid reason for an immediate deletion from SVN would be if
you take over the full history from SVN anyway *and* the package was
released so the Vcs tags are pointing to the new location.
 

Kind regards

        Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de