Converting the git archive to a more "mainstream" layout

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

I have been planning for years to convert the git repository to a more
mainstream layout that would enable us to run salsa ci and to enable
more people to contribute. I now have a plan how to do this.

My plan is to make a more git-buildpackage-friendly layout that conforms
to DEP-14.

   * in chronlogical order
     * move through all commits that are currently on the master branch
     * pull debian/changelog from all those commits
     * if the upstream version has changed
       * gbp import-orig the respective tarball
     * cherry-pick the commit

I do not plan to do gbp import-dsc for ancient versions. I might do that
for the versions that are in currently supported stable releases and
what we have in Debian unstable and testing now. The problem is that I
currently do not have an idea how to make sure that the tags in the new
repositoty actually match what we have uploaded. I'd rather not have
tags than wrong tags.

Our git repository goes back to exim 4.10 from 2002. snapshot.debian.org
only starts with exim 4.44. I was able to pull some (but not all of
them) older tarballs from an obviously forgotten  namibian ftp server
and I have found a git archive on git.exim.org where somebody has
committed the _contents_ from the old tarballs but not the tarballs
themselves.

Is it worth the effort to check everything we have or would it be
acceptable to just begin the new debian/latest branch with the earliest
version we have on Debian infrastructure (exim4 4.44-2)?

What do you think?

Andreas, would you be willing to ditch the old workflow in favor of
something that can use git-buildpackage?

(In the process of this conversion, I would remove all those ancient
branches we have and rename the old master to debian-only-historic, and
push to a private, forked project on Salsa before doing it for real).

Greetings
Marc

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Marc Haber         | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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