The current MakeMaker repository starts when I took it over back on (oh god has it been seven years) 2002. The files were just copied from bleadperl so there's no previous history in the repository.
There is previous history. Andreas provided me with a tarball of tarballs of old releases. Its been lying around moldering here: http://makemaker.org/src/MakeMaker-history/MakeMaker-history.tar Every once in a while I find an issue which I have to dig back through these tarballs to find out what lead a sane citizen of the world to make such a decision. I've wanted this information in version control for a while now so it would just show up as part of an annotate, but previous systems didn't really support the idea of adding history. Fortunately git does. I've created a "historical" branch and began importing tarballs. I got up to 4.01 before I gave up. If any other obsessive compulsives would like to spend some time doing that it would be nice. The procedure is this. 1) Let us know you're going to work on this to avoid three people all doing the same work. 2) Get and unpack MakeMaker-history.tar. 3) Checkout the historical branch from git. 4) Figure out what the next archive is by looking at the log and the versions on the archives. 5) Uncompress the archive and copy the files (or in some cases, file) in place. 6) Commit everything using... TZ=UTC GIT_AUTHOR_NAME=... GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=... GIT_AUTHOR_DATE=... git commit -a At the end of MakeMaker.pm there's a MODIFICATION HISTORY section. This contains the date, author and commit notes. Use the date and author to fill in the author name and author date. For author email, use their modern address which you should be able to find on search.cpan.org. Use the notes as the commit notes. In addition, begin the commit with what archive you got these files from, in case there's a mistake later. "From MakeMaker.pm.4.01.gz" for example. TZ=UTC GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='Tim Bunce' git_author_email=tim.bu...@pobox.com GIT_AUTHOR_DATE=25.01.1995 For bonus points look at the changes to MakeMaker.pm in the Perl repository and see if there's any parallel history. 7) GOTO 4 until you've done all you're going to do. 8) Send a note to the mailing list where your repo is and how far you got. 9) Send me a pull request. -- THIS I COMMAND!
