Re: [gentoo-dev] Removal of CVS headers

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Sun, 26 Feb 2017, Robin H Johnson wrote:

> The 2014-10-14 meeting did NOT specify what CVS headers were in
> question, and it was later decided that this was $Header$, not $Id$.

When and by whom was that decided? The unanimous council decision was
to remove "CVS headers" and the obvious understanding is that this
includes all Header, Id, Date, and so on. Quoting the actual agenda
item (which was submitted by another infra member, BTW):

# 3. CVS Headers
#
# The hateful thing. We could supposedly somehow fill them in rsync
# but that's complex and very dangerous (think of all the broken patch
# files currently in gx86). I think we should kill them.
#
# And while at it, I think it'd be good to actually remove most of
# them from our files -- changing header templates and so on. While
# not strictly useful, it decreases the size of the repo a bit and
# avoids any future nightmares :).

Then in the summary of the 2016-11-13 council meeting we have this:

- Bug 579460 "please make repoman ignore a missing "# $Id$" header line":
  Implemented in repoman-2.3.0, but not yet in stable. Once this is
  done, CVS headers can be removed as per 2014-10-14 council decision.

Note that it explicitly mentions $Id$, and until today nobody had
raised any objections against its revoval.

> This was also discussed in August 2015:
> Subject: 'Infra plans regarding $Id$ - official answer...'
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/d01ce943a9f9404c454c26bdb7efdf0e

> $Id$ is used by Git as well, and I was a strong advocate that
> expansion of $Id$ should be ENABLED in the rsync exports, because it
> allowed tracing what version of a file was actually in use.

I don't see any expansion of $Id$ in rsync as of today, 18 months
after the Git conversion. If it wasn't missed for 18 months, one can
hardly claim that it would be an important feature.

Also I suspect that it is too late to enable it now, because it will
potentially break patches that have been added after the conversion to
Git.

Ulrich