Migrating to Git from SVN for debian PHP packaging

The pkg-php team has decided to move at least a subset of the current svn projects into git. namely, php5. other packagers are invited to follow suit but at this point there doesn't seem to be interest in forcing everything to migrate.

importing previous history

however, with the "best" option there are some problems converting to git:

so, it sounds like we'll be going for the "better" option. Mark Hershberger has done an initial stab at this: http://mah.everybody.org/php.git .

handling branches in git

handling tags in git

commit messages in git

standard commit messages should be a short one-line description, optionally followed by a blank line and free-form prose describing the commit.

commits that address specific bugs should mention so in the free-form section, matching the "git dch" friendly meta syntax "^Closes: #nnnnnn". this also allows for hooks to catch the specific changes and do stuff like email the bts.

handling debian/changelog

changes to debian/changelog should be distinct from the fixes that they describe. i.e. a security fix shouldn't include both the fix and the changelog entry in the same commit, it makes merging harder.

mentioning closed bugs manually is fine, but if one puts the bug ref in the commit message then this can be automatically generated too.

desired hooks

i've been interested in getting my hands a bit more dirty with git hooks, so anything that we can't assemble from existing parts i'd be happy to hack together (sean)

for future investigation