Research information for LibreOffice

[Michael Stahl]

On 26/11/12 19:27, Mihai Codoban wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am a graduate student from the University of Illinois at Urbana -
> Champaign and I am working on a project involving repository histories.
> LibreOffice could be relevant to my research data since it has a rich
> history and activity.
> 
> After reading through your project history I understand that initial
> development was done in SVN then you switched to Git.

the reality is a lot more complicated than that i'm afraid :)

a rough and opinionated timeline:

OOo started out with CVS, because it was the only thing around that was
open source.

then with some custom tooling around CVS a feature branch development
model was adopted, where all work was done on feature branches, which
were called "CWS" or "Child Workspace", because the term "feature
branch" had not been invented yet.  due to how CVS works this also meant
that all commits were mis-attributed to the Sun release engineering team
as authors.

then OOo migrated to SVN, and in a matter of months found out that SVN
is not at all suited to a project with a development process like OOo.
release engineers started to hate their work, there was much wailing,
gnashing of teeth etc;  mis-attribution of authorship continued.

fortunately Mercurial came to the rescue and proved to be an excellent
fit for the OOo code base and development model.

then followed another dark age in which the code was scattered across 20
git repositories, annoying the heck out of developers who started to sob
uncontrollably every time they needed to bisect anything.

then the awesome git ninja Norbert heroically merged the repositories
back together, and even got rid of pesky tabs in the source at the same
time, and general happiness broke out.


a quick try of putting commit ids to that:

it appears that b0f74af166600c8623202a56744d403003284ef1 is the first
commit from a CWS integration.

SVN migration happened after DEV300 m31 tag, see
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/SVNMigration
hmm... apparently has the same problem as the next...

... it is difficult to put a commit to the HG migration in the current
repo because the Second Dark Age made a mess of it; see
ooo/DEV300_last_svn_milestone tag and ooo/DEV300_m63 and various "Create
DEV300_m63 milestone tag" commits that were originally one commit, which
was the last thing happening in SVN iirc.
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Mercurial/Migration

the Second Dark Age ended with commit
801936459fa8cd5d452f875d14da7f34a9117f08 tagged MELD_LIBREOFFICE_REPOS
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/One_Git_Conversion

for historic data you may want to look at OOo HG repository, i.e.
http://hg.services.openoffice.org/OOO340/