Re: History before 1999

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com>]

Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org> writes:

> On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 12:33:20PM -0800, Jim Blandy wrote:
> > On 1/9/06, Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com> wrote:
> > > In theory, an energetic person could graft old public releases into
> > > the repository, making a sort of synthetic history. Easier in SVN
> > > perhaps?
> > 
> > Insertion of revisions into an existing history, even at the front,
> > isn't something SVN has any special support for.  I think you'd have
> > to dump, edit, and re-load the repository.
> 
> However, Ian has some nice hack for stitching CVS repositories together
> during a CVS->SVN transition - he wrote them to add the old-gcc
> repository to GCC.  I bet we could add the additional history in the
> process of switching to SVN, if there's interest in doing that :-)

Sure, that would work.

Ideally, somebody would go through the Cygnus repository and strip out
the redacted stuff.  Unfortunately that would have to be done by
somebody currently at Red Hat.  The simplest approach would be to just
check out each revision one by one, run redact and/or sanitize, and
check the redacted revision into a new repository.  Unfortunately that
would not be reliable, as some code which should have been redacted
was checked in without appropriate markers.  So somebody would have to
actually look at the revisions and make sure that everything was
properly sanitized.

It is perhaps worth noting that the old Cygnus contracts promised to
keep things secret until permitted, or until three years had passed.
If Red Hat kept that up, then in fact everything in the Cygnus
repository up to 1999 is now safe to reveal.

Ian