Re: How to deal with historic tar-balls

[Tomas Carnecky <tom@dbservice.com>]

On 12/31/11 8:04 PM, nn6eumtr wrote:
> I have a number of older projects that I want to bring into a git 
> repository. They predate a lot of the popular scm systems, so they are 
> primarily a collection of tarballs today.
>
> I'm fairly new to git so I have a couple questions related to this:
>
> - What is the best approach for bringing them in? Do I just create a 
> repository, then unpack the files, commit them, clean out the 
> directory unpack the next tarball, and repeat until everything is loaded?
>
> - Do I need to pay special attention to files that are renamed/removed 
> from version to version?
>
> - If the timestamps change on a file but the actual content does not, 
> will git treat it as a non-change once it realizes the content hasn't 
> changed?
>
> - Last, if after loading the repository I find another version of the 
> files that predates those I've loaded, or are intermediate between two 
> commits I've already loaded, is there a way to go say that commit B is 
> actually the ancestor of commit C? (i.e. a->c becomes a->b->c if you 
> were to visualize the commit timeline or do diffs) Or do I just reload 
> the tarballs in order to achieve this?

There is a script which will import sources from multiple tarballs, 
creating a commit with the contents of each tarball. It's in the git 
repository under contrib/fast-import/import-tars.perl.

tom