Starting repository migration of portland to Git

Using CVS is a pain for me and nowadays it's pointless using it. Actually there are enough open source alternatives, distribuited or not.
Unfortunately the portland project hasn't still migrated to cgit.freedesktop.org. It's one of the few that is still stuck.

Today I have imported the repository as Git and then I have uploaded it to GitHub. I will try to keep it updated and synchronized with CVS. For it, I have opened a bug report to notify it and to ask what to do about the rewriting names task. Git has a field in every commit to specify who was the author of the patch and who has committed it and their email addresses. This is very useful to keep authorship even if the author hasn't an account to commit. As CVS lacked it, we have to "rewrite" the past. Also, CVS used a nickname to identify the author of a commit. With Git it's usual to specify your full name and your email address.

By the way, as I say in the bugreport, the new git repository can be found here:
http://github.com/PabloCastellano/portland

Let's go for the 1.0.3 release! (1.0.2 release was in June 2007 :-/)




And we are not the only ones who rewrite the past! See:
Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns (what a shame)
Nineteen Eighty-Four

Bringing buoh back to life

Buoh is a simple but practical project. Its web page defines buoh as "The online comic reader application for GNOME"

I don't know how I discovered it but I looked at the screenshots I liked it. Minutes later I discovered that the buoh package had been removed from the Debian repositories and therefore from the Ubuntu repositories too. The reason is in this debian bug report.

I checked that the bug report was true... there hadn't been movement in their mailing list for a long time, commits neither in their CVS.
I decided to bring the project to life and I contacted the authors (three spanish guys) of buoh as I could (their specified emails didn't belong to them anymore, except the one from Carlos). They told me it had started as a project to learn programming in GTK/GNOME and then they didn't have any time to maintain it, but that they would feel very happy if someone else took the maintaining responsibility. We would also move it to git.gnome.org.

Migrating from CVS to Git was a little odyssey too. I tried with the cvs2git script but I couldn't because certain "*,v" files were missing and also the directory tree wasn't correct at all. Boh. I also tried with "git cvsimport" without much more luck, but then I don't know what I changed in the parameters and it worked :). See one of the links in the bottom of this post.

I ported it to libsoup2.4 and fixed some other things.

The final result is that buoh satisfied all the rules to be uploaded to git.gnome.org and after a little clean up of unused branches I finally did it.

I will keep working on it in the next days taking advantage of the moment because I feel excited now and I have free time :)

I have also plans in 2010 to become a Debian New Maintainer and buoh is a perfect candidate package to maintain :)

http://git.gnome.org/browse/buoh/
http://buoh.steve-o.org/screenshots.html
http://issaris.blogspot.com/2005/11/cvs-to-git-and-back.html
http://joaquin.axai.mx/cvs-desde-git-y-como-mantenerlos-sincronizados (spanish)