Re: Switching heads and head vs branch after CVS import

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Aug 15, 2005, 16:42 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508150930020.3553@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20050815080931.64F0D352633@atlas.denx.de>

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Wolfgang Denk wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> I asked this question before without receiving any reply:
> 
> Assume I know exactly where the merge back happenend - is  there  any
> way to tell git about it, so I don't see all these dangling heads any
> more?

You'd have to teach cvsimport about it. Basically, in cvsimport, you have

		...
                my @par = ();
                @par = ("-p",$parent) if $parent;

which sets the parent. Right now the parent is _always_ just the previous head of the branch we're committing to (I'm no good with perl, but I think Martin was wrong - there's no code to handle the case of a merge: once we branch off, "git cvsimport" will not currently ever create a merge-commit).

But if you have some heuristic for figuring out that it's a merge, and know the other branch is, you could add more parents by just adding another ("-p", $merge_parent) to the parameters to git-commit-tree.

The problem is literally how to figure out that it's a merge. You can probably make a guess from the commit message together with possibly looking at the diff.

The good news is that if you guess wrong, and you claim a merge where none exists, it doesn't really do any real damage. It might make th history look strange, and it might make subsequent git merges harder if the branch is actually still live and you want to continue development within git. But even that is debatable (if the eventual git merge isn't trivial, you're likely to have to merge by hand anyway - and it's going to be as hard as a CVS merge would have been, because quite frankly, you've got the same information CVS had..).

		Linus