Re: CVS to git: parsing ChangeLog entries?

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

I'll answer your questions from the point of view of cvs2git, a.k.a.
cvs2svn (http://cvs2svn.tigris.org).

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> when migrating a project that uses GNU-style ChangeLogs from CVS
> to git, is it possible to extract patch author information from
> the ChangeLog entries rather than from the CVS commit logs?
> For simplicity let's first assume the project used only one
> ChangeLog file.
> 
> Asking because it is not uncommon that patches are committed on
> behalf of other people, and it would be nice to credit them.

There is no builtin support for this in cvs2git.  But the place where
the author is determined knows about the whole changeset, including any
simultaneous changes to the changelog.  So it should be possible to add
this functionality without too much work.

> Related question: when CVS commit logs have varying encoding,
> say, some latin1 and some UTF-8, is it possible to have uniformly
> encoded git log entries?

cvs2git allows you to specify multiple encodings.  It tries one after
the other until one works successfully.  It also has hooks where you can
add your own decoder using arbitrary Python code.

That reminds me that there is a Python universal decoder that uses
heuristics to determine the encoding of an arbitrary octet stream.  That
might be a nice thing to add support for....

Michael