Re: How to deal with historic tar-balls

["Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org>]

From: "Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2012 
6:30 PM
> From: "Tomas Carnecky" <tom@dbservice.com> Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2012
> 12:27 AM
>>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 doing a similar thing with a set of zip files. I grouped mine into
> batches for easier checking and putting on to separate branches. Planning
> your branch requirements is probably the biggest task, and will depend on
> how you hope to use the new repo.
>
<snip>
>> 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.
> I wasn't aware of those scripts. I'll be having a look at the zip import
> script for my needs.

Is there a mechanism for either having fast-import respect a .gitignore,
or determining if a given file/path should be ignored?
My zips contain a lot of compile by-products that should be excluded from 
the repo.

> My extra problem is that almost all my zips have an extra top level
> directory that changes its name for every zip (but some don't..). The TLD
> changes confuses the git rename detection if I don't remove them before
> committing. Fortunately it's an internal development project with no 
> formal
> releases so creating the history is a bit of a personal project which
> doesn't affect ongoing development (which is the crunch question for
> fidelity of the repo you create).
>
>> tom
> Philip