[TYPO3-core] Git Experts: Fix amnesia?

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Helmut,

> what I learned from using Git is that nearly anything is possible.
> Now I have a challenging problem I'd like to discuss.
> 
> When moving to namespaces, we moved and at the same time changed files
> in our master branch.

I noticed this, too. This is really bad and I had already given up on
finding a fix for it, because it will require severe changes in either
case as far as I know.

As I'm not an expert myself, I would like to have a feedback from Peter,
Steffen and Karsten, whom I think are most familar with the internas of
Git...

> With doing both we lost our complete history of the newly renamed files.
> 
> That is really a pity and if possible I want to fix that.

Me too! But whatever we do, I assume it will cause a lot of overhead
work. The longer we wait, the more work it will mean.

> I have two ideas how we can manage to do that.
> 
> 1. Rewrite the history of the *remote* repo
> 2. a) Change the content of the original files with their current
>       content
>    b) Remove the new files
>    c) Move the "old" files to their new location
>    d) Add the dummy files in the old location.
> 
> The first one would have the downside, that we would void all cloned
> repos out there, but we would have a clean repo again.
> 
> The second one should work, but is of course a lot of work. We should
> only do that if we can do it with a script.

The 2nd option will also break history between the start of the rename
and today. The result would probably be the same (everyone will need to
rebase their changes). Therefore I'm not sure if this makes any sense.

Option 1 sounds good to me *if* it is possible. Everyone would need to
rebase their changes, of course. That means a lot of work once, but we
would get back the full history again.

> So the questions are:
> 
> Is it worth fixing this history loss?
> Can someone put effort on this task?

Plus: Is everyone ok with having to rebase their unmerged changes?

If it's possible, then I'd say it's worth the hassle.

Greetings, Michael