git-debimport(1)

NAME

git-debimport - create a git repository from a set of existing Debian packages

SYNOPSIS

git-debimport path-prefix

DESCRIPTION

This program will take all files that match ${path-prefix}_*.diff.gz, and the list of corresponding orig.tar.gz files, and create a git repository from them.

For example:
$ mkdir mydestdir && cd mydestdir
$ git-debimport ../mysrcdir/mypackagename

It is unfortunate that at the present time, many of the tools for importing source to git from an existing revision control system all leave something to be desired. This script does not solve that problem. What it does do however is create a repository that makes it possible to accurately extract all of the earlier packages which were injected to it. This is sadly more than can be said for the result of running git-cvsimport on a repo created by cvs-buildpackage, for example.

It is currently very simple, and makes a number of hard-coded assumptions about the resulting repo. It presently does not handle 'native' packages, and will create a repo with two branches, merged at their HEAD:

upstream - for the pristine upstream source
master - for the Debianised source

While the loss of fine grained history on individual commits is most regrettable, this script enables a maintainer to import a usable record of the previously released packages as a base for future development. This may be an acceptable trade-off for people who feel the advantage of moving future development to git now outweighs the inconvenience of needing to refer to a legacy repository for full details of previous commits.

Hopefully the problems of accurately importing from other revision control systems will be solved one day, but in the meantime, a brief but accurate history seems more useful than a detailed but largely bogus one.

SEE ALSO

gitpkg(1),

AUTHOR

gitpkg was written by Ron <ron@debian.org>.

September 21, 2007 GIT-DEBIMPORT(1)