Re: Importing non-version controlled bits and pieces to Git

From: Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com>
Date: Jun 24, 2008, 05:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20080624051204.GA1760@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0806231543580.31319@ds9.cixit.se>

On 2008-06-23 15:46:11 +0100, Peter Karlsson wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Peter Karlsson:
>
> > That might work. My problem is the non-linearity of the data I
> > want to import. But I might be able to massage the import-tars
> > output before I feed it to git-fast-import to describe the history
> > I need it to.
>
> I ended up making a script that converted a description file that
> described the hierarchy of versions and generated a fast-import file
> from it. Good to have so that I could move stuff around a bit to
> make up a version tree that looked somewhat reasonable (a lot of
> cross-directory copying has been going on here, and no-one knows
> which version is which).

A bit too late now, but ... another thing you could have done is make a straight linear import à la import-tars, and then modified the parentage with grafts until it looked good; and then finally use filter-branch to make the grafts part of the "real" history.

The advantage of this approach is that you can edit the parentage almost interactively, which should be the best approach given that you have a small number of commits and have to guess their relationships.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle