Re: [Evolution-hackers] History is gone after wip/gsettings branch merge

[Patrick Ohly <patrick ohly gmx de>]

On Mon, 2011-11-28 at 08:27 +0100, Milan Crha wrote:
> 	Hi,
> I just realized a very sad thing, the history of certain files is gone
> after the merge of wip/gsettings branch into evolution master. I tried
> both gitk and git log on mail/e-mail-session.c and the history is ending
> on October 6th, 2010.

I had a copy of the git repo before that merge and the history of that
file also ended on that date. I doubt that this has anything to do with
any git merge.

> The question is: Can this be fixed?

Very hard. Most likely the initial conversion from svn was incomplete.
One could redo the conversion and/or rewrite the history, but that
implies all commits done later and all trees that other people currently
work with become invalid and need to be rebased.

IMHO it would be better to add the missing history as independent
branches.

> P.S.: I never trusted the git merge, it breaks many things, from commit
> times/dates

Huh? How that? "git merge" only adds one commit. It does not rewrite
existing commits from any of the branches that get merged.

>  to lost work from others if the merger is not careful
> enough.

Now that is indeed a valid concern. A "git merge" is like applying a
single, fairly complex patch (assuming that the branch which gets merged
is large). To be on the safe side, a merge could be prepared, pushed to
a separate branch and then get reviewed before fast-forwarding the real
branch.

The downside is that any change on the real branch in the meantime
requires redoing the merge or accepting some kind of unreviewed merging
again: merge A+B = C gets reviewed, A' + C does not, which might be okay
if the delta between A and A' is small and does not lead to further
conflicts with C.

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Patrick Ohly gmx de
http://www.estamos.de/