[python-committers] History lost in svn to hg conversion

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
..
> A quick search found the following message by Dirkjan, but it is likely
> earlier messages on the subject had been posted too:
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-July/090325.html
>

No wonder I missed that.  I assume you are referring to this part of a
multi-page post:

"""
* Get agreement on branch strategy and branch processing (list of
branches + proposed handling at
http://hg.python.org/pymigr/file/tip/all-branches.txt) <--- PLEASE
REVIEW
"""

Even now, this does not sound to me like "WARNING: We are going to
drop substantial chunks of history during hg migration.  If you want
to see the history of work you did in your feature branches preserved,
please speak up."

> By the way, the "pymigr" repository where the "all-branches.txt" file is
> stored is now only accessible through the ssh:// URLs, as someone
> complained that unmangled e-mail addresses of former committers were
> given out by the Web UI (in the "author-map" file).
>

How do I access this file now?  I tried

$ hg cat ssh://hg@hg.python.org/pymigr/file/tip/all-branches.txt
ssh:/hg at hg.python.org/pymigr/file/tip/all-branches.txt: No such file
in rev 39047f8bd1d1


> Regardless, since Alexander's previous work was in the sandbox repo (not
> the python repo),

See issue7989 for the details on how Lib/datetime.py was developed.

> I don't think it would have been possible to integrate
> it during the hg migration.

Since I understand that the current plan is to preserve read-only SVN
repository indefinitely, I don't think anything needs to be done other
than making tracker smarter a Martin suggested.  However, if
maintaining an SVN server becomes a burden, maybe the complete SVN
history should be converted to an Hg instance  using some lossless
process.