[Bioc-devel] Git-svn: getting it to work while keeping your git history

[Leonardo Collado Torres]

Hi,

Now that BioC 3.2 is released, I need a little bit of guidance on git-svn.

I know that the bridges won't work anymore and my past attempt at the
new git-svn setup was kind of a mess (see
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2015-June/007726.html). But
I'm ready to give it another go.

My understanding is that the easiest thing to do right now would be to
fork https://github.com/Bioconductor-mirror/REPO and continue from
there as in scenario 2 from
http://bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/git-mirrors/ Doing so would
mean losing the git history, which would mean losing links between
commit messages and issues: well, the issues would be gone too, etc.
In this scenario, I guess that folks in my situation could keep their
current git repo somewhere as an archive of what happened in case the
info is needed.

However, from Jim Hester's message at
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2015-September/008013.html
I'm inferring that things would break again with a GitHub pull request
that involved a git merge, which would be a bummer. Jim also mentions
that there might be alternatives coming soon.


Now, looking at other git-svn threads in bioc-devel I found that the
steps Mike specified in
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2015-September/008018.html
work well. I tested this yesterday with success. However, you have to
keep following his steps every time you want to commit to svn because
following the scenario 2 steps in
http://bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/git-mirrors/ lead to a
"unable to determine upstream SVN history" error.

As of right now, Mike's steps are the best alternative for using
git-svn and keeping your git history. I know that it would add
spurious commits like
https://github.com/leekgroup/derfinderHelper/commit/af2457bb07aad066773f010e203f5d4c8f6696bd
(from "git merge -s ours git_svn_starting_point_commit_id" step in
Mike's instructions) and
https://github.com/leekgroup/derfinderHelper/commit/9916b1ef49e32107ed5bee501e49731a7b4f3434
(from "git checkout master; git merge devel" to merge back the svn
history to git). It's not super clean, but it works.

Or is there another option that I'm missing? Is there any reason why I
should not follow Mike's steps? I'm guessing that any alternatives to
git-svn will take a while to develop.

Thanks,
Leo

Leonardo Collado Torres, PhD Candidate
Department of Biostatistics
Johns Hopkins University
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Website: http://lcolladotor.github.io/about.html