On 16/02/26 15:02, Marc Haber wrote:
On Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 07:07:10PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 06:43:37PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
The monk in me would like to rebuild the full repository that way, retroactivly joining the past release tags that are now in the repository with the points in the past when gbp import-orig --pristine-tar /path/to/tarball was called on a release tarball.

That didn't leave me alone and I spent the weekend with git, and aide. aide is one my my oldest packages, reasonably simple but still having two decades of development history in git (obviously started in CVS, got migrated to svn eventually, and then finally to git).

Hi Marc, thanks for the detailed report.

I have something to add, just an aside, that may influence how you look at the results of your experiment.

Sadly, just running git log on debian/latest (which is probably the single most important branch) only shows merge commits now.

+

gbp import-orig nicely took care of the differences between upstream git and the release tarball.

`gbp import-orig` produces suboptimal merges that mix upstream and Debian changes in an unreadable way <https://bugs.debian.org/804722>.

Could you please try to locally apply the patch proposed in that bug report and see if produces a graph that looks (slightly) more understandable and more sustainable in the long run?

(Assuming all your work was done via a script.)

Neither am I. I am still glad I did that since I am not so sure any more whether keeping upstrem history in Debian git while trying to build a connection between the two will scale over decades, or whether it will just make our repositories incomprehensible as the years pass.

What I know is that it simplifies _now_ using patches from upstream in Debian and extracting Debian patches for submission upstream.

Once again, thank you for your experiment and for taking the time to write a detailed report about it!

Regards,

--
Gioele Barabucci

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