RE: Breaking up a monolothic repository

> From: Trent W. Buck
> Sent: Monday, 9 September 2013 12:17 PM
> Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel_at_gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Lock the existing repo: Do clean exports, and imports, to new
> > repositories with the new layout, with a README.md or other
> guideline
> > to where the legacy repository exists. You lose the infinitely
> > preserved history this way, but for most working software projects,
> > you don't *need* that. And it's a good opportunity to discard
> > materials, such as bulky binaries or security sensitive
> files with plain text passwords.
>
> Ah, sorry, I forgot to mention that preserving history was a
> hard requirement handed down from higher up.

You *could* argue that the existing repository preserves the history.
However, I think I know what they mean.

> I get the impression that $company's projects mostly have a
> finite lifespan (a couple of years),

By "lifespan", what exactly do you mean? At my company, the individual projects might be in production within anywhere from 6 months to 2 years after start of development, be manufactured for two to four years, then go into support mode for up to 7 years (or more).

> so I think that approach
> ends up being very similar to my current plan of creating new
> projects as new repos, and letting the monolithic repo die
> out via attrition.

That sounds like an easy way to do things.

> I don't actually know exactly what they put in their repos; I
> think it's about half "huge unpacked source tarball I
> downloaded from somewhere then tinkered with" and half huge
> CAD files and .docx contracts.

It's entirely possible that the empty commit messages you reported were due to users not actually entering anything in the messages. Many of the commit messages I've seen (particularly from non-software people, but even from a few of those) are less informative than I'd like - a lot are totally empty.

Regards,

Geoff

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