in reply to Federico Mena Quintero

Things that blew my mind today about Emacs:

* It requires at least librsvg 2.14, which is from 2006, which is when rsvg_handle_get_dimensions() was introduced. That function was deprecated in 2.52, in 2021. If available, Emacs will use all the new APIs. There is #ifdef hell in there.

* src/image.c is 13K lines of code.

* Emacs still uses debbugs.

* The first commit is from 1985, but the first hundreds of commits are weird. It normalizes in 1991.

* And Savannah still uses cgit.

in reply to Federico Mena Quintero

re: early commits in Emacs.

I had this side project to normalize the old RCS/CVS history for a lot of the early #GNU programs into Git. I think maybe my retirement hobby will be to pick that up.

Also, There is a set of “lost tapes” — open-reel magnetic tapes that had the 1984-circa 1994 early GNU backups – a goldmine of history. When I worked at FSF, we sent a giant box to a volunteer to bring them onto modern disks, & AFAIK the volunteer ghosted & no one knows where they are. 😕

#gnu
in reply to Bradley Kuhn

@bkuhn current tooling to go direct from CVS to git must be incredibly better than what was available years ago, what with the gcc -> git migration.

The two times (I think?) GNOME has changed VCS, from cvs -> svn -> git there was a small, dedicated team of people basically writing custom tooling to do it (or adapting tools to do that), and there are SO MANY SPECIAL CASES. A bunch of repos have funny commits near the beginning, and then they settle down and appear normal.

in reply to Federico Mena Quintero

I haven't looked who the 80s' stuff imported, but I suspect it was particularly bad (as you said) because:

GNU development used SCCS (proprietary), then¹ RCS once it was stable enough, and *then* imported it into CVS from there, which, in turn, was imported to Git. I am pretty sure no one has the backups of the old RCS files (except the lost tapes I mentioned upthread), & to get the truly old data well-imported, we'd need those.

¹There may have been YA RCS-like one inbetween.