John says:
The main reason [why git-mirror.gnome.org
doesn't make git.gnome.org any easier] is of course
the polluted logs (filled with git-svn rev id
metadata). I would resist any module having a Git repo
with such ickyness in its history.
This is a non-issue. Ruby on Rails
used to be hosted on Subversion, and then it switched to
Git. To do the conversion, they simply used git-svn.
You can do
"git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git",
then "git log" and search for "git-svn" in
the output in order to find the git-svn metadata.
You'll see this:
... git-based development goes here ...
commit 67022671bfa28d5675a30925a8d1e271c576f4d2
Author: David Heinemeier Hansson
Date: Thu Apr 10 22:09:13 2008 -0500
Testing commits
commit ed99dda174da439a0947cdabea3babf027c672ac
Author: Rick Olson
Date: Thu Apr 10 18:06:05 2008 +0000
Change validates_uniqueness_of :case_sensitive option default back to true (from [9160]). Love your database columns, do
n't LOWER them. [rick]
git-svn-id: http://svn-commit.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk@9248 5ecf4fe2-1ee6-0310-87b1-e25e094e27de
... svn-based development went here ...
So, in the commit logs, you have everything since
$beginning_of_time until $switchover_date with the
git-svn-id strings, and everything after that without
any such garbage, as would be normal for "plain" git
repositories.
Having that metadata in the log actually provides
valuable information.
If you have to do code
archaeology (which Eric Sink calls "traceability"),
then the commit log will tell you when the
svn->git switchover occured. Before that point, you
know that any branches are dead-ends and merges are
funny (svn didn't handle them).
You'll know that before the switchover point,
information about code attribution will not be 100%
clear, as you couldn't specify --author in an
svn commit (so you'll perhaps have to look at the actual
ChangeLog and hope that the committer was kind enough to
say "original patch by $author").
When you do a conversion between revision control
systems, you keep the old system around in read-only
mode for if anything goes wrong. It's nice to know that
if we ever need to check something in the original SVN
repository, we'll have the SVN revision numbers from the
git-svn metadata.
Finally, the git-svn strings in commit logs will
disappear really quickly from your everyday view. They
just appear further and furter back in time, and you
seldom look at those commits, anyway.