ALERT: cimtest.git repository history recreated

Daniel P. Berrangé berrange at redhat.com
Tue Apr 7 15:24:49 UTC 2020


In attempting to import the cimtest.git repository to gitlab I discovered
some serious problems in the current git history.

Specifically the author and committer email addresses were badly mangled
for many commits.

For example an author of:

   Deepti B. Kalakeri<deeptik at linux.vnet.ibm.com> <Deepti B. Kalakeri<deeptik at linux.vnet.ibm.com>>

This is so badly malformed that both gitlab and github refuse to allow
the commits in question to be pushed.

Not only that, but "git filter-branch" and "git fast-import" will both
crash and burn when trying to parse these, so if you try to rewrite
email addresses with "git filter-branch" it makes it even worse.


The only solution was to use "git fast-export --all" to dump the entire
history to a file, then hand edit this to fix the broken addresses that
were confusing filter-branch, then use "git fast-import" to initialize
a new repository.

cimtest.git is a ancient repo that hasn't seen changes since 2014, so
I'm guessing it is unlikely any current contributor has a checkout of
it. If someone does though, you'll have to throw away your current
checkout and get a new clone, as the history has been fully rewritten
to fix this problem.

I suspect the root cause dates from when we imported the original
Mercurial repo into Git. Our conversion process probably mangled
some addresses without us realizing at the time.

Regards,
Daniel
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