Geoff Field <geoff_fi...@aapl.com.au> writes:
>> I get the impression that $company's projects mostly have a finite
>> lifespan (a couple of years),
>
> By "lifespan", what exactly do you mean? At my company, the
> individual projects might be in production within anywhere from 6
> months to 2 years after start of development, be manufactured for two
> to four years, then go into support mode for up to 7 years (or more).
That's probably a more accurate way of putting it.
But the bottom line is migration through attrition ought to work.
> It's entirely possible that the empty commit messages you reported
> were due to users not actually entering anything in the messages.
> Many of the commit messages I've seen (particularly from non-software
> people, but even from a few of those) are less informative than I'd
> like - a lot are totally empty.
Ah, sorry, I wasn't clear. Supposing the repo has two subdirs:
projects/1_Muffins
projects/2_Cakes
Then when I use svnsync to make a repo that only contains
projects/2_Cakes, I still have a bunch of commits that WERE making
changes to projects/1_Muffins -- so they have commit messages and
authors and times and suchlike metadata -- but they don't actually *do*
anything anymore, because they files they edited aren't in
projects/2_Cakes.
If there were only two projects, it wouldn't be too bad, but suppose 100
projects, with 1000 commits each. If I use svnsync, I end up with 100
repos, each of which has 99,000 useless commits.
