[webkit-dev] Re: Should we consider switching to git over svn?

[Alp Toker]

Thumbs up on this one. git certainly has the potential to make WebKit 
development more accessible and transparent.

It might be worth talking with other large projects that have migrated 
from CVS or SVN (like xorg, freedesktop.org, wine) to see if they have 
any useful commit history post-processing scripts or general hindsight 
advice.

I've found that the point of migration is a good opportunity to scrub 
project history a little. For example, I've written a tool (used in a 
previous migration) that extracts authorship and reviewed-by information 
from the commit logs and turns them into git's equivalent AUTHOR_ID, 
COMMITTER_ID and Signed-off-by fields, cleaning up the commit log 
messages as it goes and optionally eliminating all modifications to the 
"ChangeLog" files. This makes the history retro-actively far more 
useful, making it easier to revert old patches, do bisection searches, 
review old patches in a new light etc. It's kind of like discovering a 
history you never knew your project had ;-)