[Pkg-fonts-devel] converting fontforge packaging repo to git

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 02/02/2012 11:47 PM, Vasudev Kamath wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 6:50 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> wrote:
>> The good news is that i think i see a way to short-circuit that, and
>> provide clean debian releases from the upstream VCS.
>>
>> So if you can hang tight for another day or so, i hope to have something
>> to present that folks can pick apart.
> 
> Sure I'll hang arround :)

OK, i think i've got a variant of the full history, merged with some of
upstream's history published here:

 git://lair.fifthhorseman.net/~dkg/fontforge

i'm quite sure i made some mistakes in the packaging (if you look
closely, you'll find some half-assed cleanups from me), and i'm also
pretty sure that there are could be a better way for someone with more
time than i find at the moment to integrate all the historical data we
have.  The repo as i've published it is rather larger than i'd wanted :/

it's also complicated by the fact that until a few years ago we were
packaging fontforge from combined upstream tarballs, which makes the
repository history less-than-useful for constructing old releases, and
by the apparent back-and-forth in our packaging repo about whether we
want to ship upstream source in the packaging repo or not.

i've tried to tag the more recent releases as well, and to link them to
upstream's released versions (not easily done given upstream's
less-than-sterile release practices).

some steps someone who wants to improve and minimize the repo could do:

 0) filter-branch and rebase to remove all old commits from the debian
packaging branch that included upstream source.  now that we're working
with upstream's material and history in the same repo, we don't really
need that data locally

 1) improve my attempt to provide a branch that is just upstream
releases; i'm pretty sure i botched that somewhere along the way.
perhaps merging just from one upstream release to another is the way to go?

any takers?  Anyone want to look at the repo and make other suggestions?

Beware that the current repo as i've published it is subject to
potentially-radical change if any of the above cleanup happens.

If we can get this cleaned up, i'm willing to take a crack at doing a
snapshot debian package released from upstream git sometime next week. i
think that should be significantly easier once the history-massaging is
laid to rest.

	--dkg, the half-assed svn→git migrator