Re: All I wanted was git-fast-export

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 10, 2008, 00:58 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LSU.1.00.0802100054490.11591@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <47AE2CDF.4090208@glidos.net>

Hi,

On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Paul Gardiner wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Paul Gardiner wrote:
> > 
> > > With your kind help, I've been able to convert a cvs repository to 
> > > git, but the last several years commits start with a line saying 
> > > "Summary;" :-( I thought it might not be hard to put a filter 
> > > between git-fast-export and git-fast-import to sort it out.
> > 
> > The better tool for this should be filter-branch.
> 
> filter-branch does look to be brilliant for this sort of thing,
> but I don't think I can use it in my case.

I beg to differ. filter-branch does exactly the same as the fast-export | filter | fast-import you prosed does: it rewrites history.

The thing is, filter-branch was _written for this purpose_. So if you know what commit you rewrote last, you can make the process faster/safer by issuing

	$ git filter-branch --msg-filter="<blabla>" <old-commit>..master

There's also a further upside to filter-branch: at least until recently, it did not use any special features of newer git, but could be extracted (e.g. via gitweb) and used with older git (any git >= 1.5.3 should do, maybe even older ones).

Hth, Dscho

P.S.: but you seem to be dead-set to upgrade. No problem for me: just go ahead and do what you must.