Joseph Myers <jos...@codesourcery.com>:
> On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>
> > One thing my software can do now that it couldn't do six months ago
> > is mine Author fields from ChangeLog histories. So you'll get a
> > better-quality conversion than if I had been able to finish this then.
>
> Observations from the code for doing this, without having run experiments:
>
> * As I understand it, it sets an author date for a commit based on the
> ChangeLog date, as well as setting the commit author (separate from the
> committer which I presume remains as converted by the author map). I'd be
> very wary of that giving good information; in general I think copying the
> committer date to the author date is probably better. People writing
> ChangeLog entries manually often get the date very wrong - maybe a
> completely wrong year (20017-12-11), maybe the previous year (2017-01-01
> when it's actually 2018-01-01), maybe the wrong month, maybe swap month
> and date. The previous discussions on the gcc list had some people
> wanting better author attributions based on ChangeLog entries; I don't
> think anyone was expecting anything useful to come from dates in
> ChangeLogs.
Philosophically, though, some would argue that it's better to make the
metadata consistent with the ChangeLogs even if it's erroneous, and
cop to the problem when documenting the conversion. Some days I think
this, some days I go the other way. Not a hill I'd die on.
Another possibility is to bogon-filter the Changelog dates. I can think of
several obvious ways to do this.
> * There's an older ChangeLog style that the code doesn't handle but which
> can be found in older GCC commits, with header lines such as:
>
> Tue Dec 9 01:16:06 1997 Jeffrey A Law (l...@cygnus.com)
>
> This format sometimes has the email address surrounded by (), sometimes by
> <>. There are a few log entries with a hybrid of old and new forms, where
> there is a yyyy-mm-dd date but an email address surrounded by ().
Shouldn't be too difficult to handle this.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
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