Re: git am from scratch

[Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>]

On Thursday, 19 March 2009 21:18:17 Jeff King wrote:
> I don't think this has ever worked in any version of git.

I did find a way to help myself in the end. Still it was still a major, 
unnecessary annoyance.

I ran into this problem when trying to reconstruct a project's history (after 
going RCS -> CVS -> git many things were still wrong like unrelated RCS files 
which ended up in the history, RCS files being moved to the Attic in the 
original tree to indicate deletes [which means they will happily live on from 
a CVS point of view], etc.).

The easiest way I could find how to get rid of all the mess without going 
totally insane was to git-format-patch the repository, fix up the major 
things in the mbox, and then recreate the history.

In the end I ended up preparing the initial commit by hand followed 
by "commit -c HASH" to preserve the metadata. (The cvsimport branch had a 
different commit at its tip, so I couldn't use commit --amend on that.) After 
that, I git-am'ed the rest of the mbox onto that reconstructed commit. This 
could have been significantly easier.

> There are many other ways to do this.

That's really not the point. Thanks though.

Andreas