Re: Corrupted commits prevent import/export of this repo

Hi Josh, *,

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 12:52 PM Josh <jjenner689@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was hoping someone would help me with the trouble I have importing/exporting this repo. To 
> setup context I'm trying to import this repo to Azure Devops where our team will work and then I 
> would periodically push updates made to the main repo (https://github.com/LibreOffice/core.git) 
> to my azure devops repo.
>
> The problem I get is that Azure Devops won't allow the import of this repo due to corrupted 
> commits. The error can be seen below:
> […]
> I may add that this is also the case if you try to import to GitHub as well (I understand you can 
> fork in the case of github). You will also get this error if you clone locally and try to push to 
> an empty repo (github or azure devops).

Yes - back when we had github setup as a mirror, we had to approach
github admins - we did at first due to the size of the repo and
whether they are OK with hosting it, and then for the import due to
the bad commits in the history (conversion from csv to svn to
mercurial to git....)

see https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2012-November/041321.html
and also
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2012-November/041333.html
as for why the history has not been rewritten back then...

> I've done some investigating as best I can and I'm almost certain it's due to the inconsistent 
> use of angle brackets or spaces. By running tests locally with fast-export and import I think 
> I've located all the corrupted authors below:
>
> Andre Fischer<andre.f.fischer <Andre Fischer<andre.f.fischer@oracle.com>>
> Andre Fischer<Andre.W.Fischer <Andre Fischer<Andre.W.Fischer@Sun.COM>>
> Gregor Hartmann<gh <Gregor Hartmann<gh@openoffice.org>>
> Joerg Skottke <Joerg Skottke [jsk] jsk@openoffice.org>>

I think there are a few more malformed ones, but even knowing all of
them wouldn't change things..

> Is there a way we could update these in the main repo so that me and others wishing to 
> export/import the repo could do so?

No, that's not possible, it would be a completely different repository
then/all hashes would change.

> If so I'm not sure on the best way to go about it my knowledge of git is not particularly 
> advanced?

You need someone with administrative powers on azure to do the initial
import for you/need to contact azure support.

ciao
Christian