*I thought* he was saying it's not good for a community/tool when people develop exporters that take dumps from their system and use it to write importers into competing tools (eg GIT) without providing the reverse.
What he thinks we should be doing is writing *importers* for our tool, to take git dumps and import them to SVN. The problem is that it is now easy to migrate from SVN to git, but it's not so easy to migrate from git to SVN.
I guess this state of play is quite normal - new stuff always has people willing to write tools to support it. I wrote a VSS to SVN importer, because I needed one, but no-one really needs a git to SVN importer as git is the new kid. Maybe one day they'll see the need to migrate from git, and someone will then write the tool to do that.
Perhaps Mr Raymond will put his money where his mouth is and write this git->svn tool if reposurgeon makes it so easy.
<stands back and waits for Eric to say "I'll bloody well show him", and write it> :)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg Stein [mailto:gstein_at_gmail.com]
> Sent: 27 November 2010 09:49
> To: Eric Raymond
> Cc: dev_at_subversion.apache.org
> Subject: Re: If RCS can stand it, why can't your system?
>
> We have an import/export format that has existed since svn 1.0, and that is
> our dumpfile format. I do not think we are "required" or need to be
> "shamed" into supporting additional formats.
>
> And for what it's worth, a *git* GSoC student wrote a remote dumpfile
> generator to feed into git's fast-import. We gave the guy commit access to
> *our* trunk and let him build the tool.
>
> Also: we have extended our diff generation to support git's diff markers.
>
> In short, there is NO WAY anybody can say we have something against git. If
> somebody came along with code to deal with git's streams, then we'd
> consider it, and the utility it may provide over our own dumpfile format.
>
> So I'm not quite sure what your post and tool is supposed to be saying to our
> community. I don't get it.
>
> -g
>
> On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 02:25, Eric Raymond <esr_at_snark.thyrsus.com>
> wrote:
> > I've written software for a lot of different reasons besides pure
> > utility in the past. Sometimes I've been making an aesthetic
> > statement, sometimes I've hacked to perpetuate a tribal in-joke, and
> > at least once I have written a substantial piece of code exactly
> > because the domain experts solemnly swore that job was impossible to
> > automate (wrong, bwahahaha).
> >
> > Here's a new one. Today I released a program that is ugly and only
> > marginally useful, but specifically designed to shame other hackers
> > into doing the right thing.
> >
> > The rest at <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2762>.
> > --
> > Eric S. Raymond
> >
> > No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The
> > possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.
> > -- "Political Disquisitions", a British republican tract of
> > 1774-1775
> >
Received on 2010-11-29 18:23:28 CET