On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > One thing my software can do now that it couldn't do six months ago > is mine Author fields from ChangeLog histories. So you'll get a > better-quality conversion than if I had been able to finish this then.
Observations from the code for doing this, without having run experiments: * As I understand it, it sets an author date for a commit based on the ChangeLog date, as well as setting the commit author (separate from the committer which I presume remains as converted by the author map). I'd be very wary of that giving good information; in general I think copying the committer date to the author date is probably better. People writing ChangeLog entries manually often get the date very wrong - maybe a completely wrong year (20017-12-11), maybe the previous year (2017-01-01 when it's actually 2018-01-01), maybe the wrong month, maybe swap month and date. The previous discussions on the gcc list had some people wanting better author attributions based on ChangeLog entries; I don't think anyone was expecting anything useful to come from dates in ChangeLogs. * There's an older ChangeLog style that the code doesn't handle but which can be found in older GCC commits, with header lines such as: Tue Dec 9 01:16:06 1997 Jeffrey A Law (l...@cygnus.com) This format sometimes has the email address surrounded by (), sometimes by <>. There are a few log entries with a hybrid of old and new forms, where there is a yyyy-mm-dd date but an email address surrounded by (). -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
