On Mon, 16 Dec 2019, Jeff Law wrote:

> > Joseph Myers has made his choice.  He has said repeatedly that he
> > wants to follow through with the reposurgeon conversion, and he's
> > putting his effort behind that by writing tests and even contributing
> > code to reposurgeon.
> > 
> > We'll get this done faster if nobody is joggling his elbow. Or mine.
> And just to be clear, my preference is for reposurgeon, if it's ready. 
> But if it isn't, then I'm absolutely comfortable dropping back to
> Maxim's conversion or even the existing mirror.

As the remaining changes being made to the reposurgeon conversion are of 
the form "tidy things up where reposurgeon is already making a reasonable 
conservative choice but minor improvements are still possible", I think 
it's very clearly ready and propose doing the actual conversion with 
reposurgeon over the weekend of 11/12 January [*], with whatever 
improvements to commit messages and authors are ready by then.  (People 
would then be free to note issues found afterwards, with the potential to 
address them if some other version control system takes over from git in 
20 years' time, just as some issues from cvs2svn are being addressed in 
this conversion.)

This is explicitly not aiming for perfection, but saying that having some 
improved commit message summaries and authors, based on a combination of 
sufficiently safe heuristics and manual review of cases heuristics suggest 
may be questionable and that can be reviewed in time, without trying to 
have the best possible commit message or author in every case, is better 
than falling back to only the original commit messages and only using the 
committer as the author.

[*] The time taken by a reposurgeon conversion is actually dominated by 
time spent in git (git-fast-import takes about four hours to import the 
repository, git gc --aggressive takes over an hour to repack it 
afterwards) and in validation against SVN, not in reposurgeon itself, so 
doesn't take a whole weekend, but there will be other things such as hook 
setup and testing and documenting usage of the repository.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jos...@codesourcery.com

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