[Numpy-discussion] Technicalities of the SVN -> GIT transition

[David Cournapeau]

Hi there,

I have looked back into the way to convert the existing numpy svn
repository into git. It went quite smoothly using svn2git (developed
by the KDE team for their own transition), but there are a few
questions which need to be answered:

 - Shall we keep the old svn branches ? I think most of them are just
cruft, and can be safely removed We would then just keep the release
branches (in maintenance/***)
 - Tag conversion: svn has no notion of tags, so translating them into
 git tags cannot be done automatically in a safely manner (and we do
have some rewritten tags in the svn repo). I was thinking about
creating a small script to create them manually afterwards for the
releases, in the svntags/***.
 - Author conversion: according to git, there are around 50 committers
in numpy. Several of them are double and should be be merged I think
(kern vs rkern, Travis' accounts as well), but there is also the
option to set up real emails. Since email are "private", I don't want
to just "scrape" them without asking permission first. I don't know
how we should proceed here.

The author conversion needs to be decided upfront (as changing name in
committers will cause to change every sha256), tags and scrapping
branches may be done later.

Last time we discussed things, there were some concerns about space:
the numpy git repo is around 17 Mb for the full history, 36 Mb if one
includes the working tree, compared to 43 Mb for a trunk checkout from
svn. The master branch (the "trunk" in git) has ~ 6500 commits.

cheers,

David