repomapper(1) Manual Page

repomapper [-i] [-h 'host'] 'contribmap' [ update-files ]

Older, centralized version-control systems such as CVS and SVN carry a repository on one host and identify users by their account names on that host. Distributed version-control systems such as Git and Mercurial identify users by a netwide-unique ID consisting of a name-among-humans followed by an email address.

When moving a repository from a centralized to a distributed system, therefore, one of the prerequisites is compiling a contributor map that associates each account name on the old system to a DVCS-style ID on the new one. This tool automates parts of that process.

The main argument file must be a contributor map such as is read by the "authors read" subcommand of reposurgeon(1). It may be a fresh or stub map, produced by "authors write" before any human-name or email information has been added to the repository. Or it may have name-among-humans and email information filled in for some entries.

A stub map entry looks something like this:

The same entry, fully filled in, might look something like this:

The default behavior of the tool is to report all map entries, in effect a sorting copy of the file.

With -i, it reports only entries that are not yet in DVCS form - that is, either the fullname field on the right side of the equals sign is identical to the account name on the left, or the email field contains no @-sign, or both.

Additional argument files are mined for entries missing in the stub map.

An argument file containing an equals sign ("=") in its first line, or leading its first line with a hash sign ("#"), is interpreted as a supplementary map file. Each contributor entry with a username not matching any in the first contributor map is copied into the first map, which is output.

An argument file containing multiple colons on the first line is interpreted as a Unix password file. Only the username and the comment (or 'gecos') field containing the user’s name-among-humans are used. Other fields are ignored. For each entry in the contrib file, this program looks for a username in the password file matching the name to the left of the equal sign. If a match is found, the user’s name-among-humans is extracted from the gecos field and replaces the text between the "=" and the "<".

Thus, the stub line above and the '/etc/passwd' line

will combine to produce this on output:

Note that the email-address part (and, if present, the optional trailing timezone field) are not normally modified when a password file is processed.

However, if the -h option is given, the argument is taken to be a host name which should be appended (after a @) to every email field that does not already contain a @. The argument would typically be the fully-qualified domain name of the repository host.

Thus, if the passwd file still contains an entry for every committer (which might not be the case if inactive committer accounts were ever removed), -p mode combined with an -h option can produce an entire, valid contributor map.

If an argument file begins with "From " it is interpreted as a Unix mailbox file - this mode is intended for mining a project’s email archive. The headers are scanned for names. When a name with a user-id part matching an incomplete entry is found, that email address is used to fill in the entry. If there are multiple matches the last is kept.

Output from this tool is always a contribution map sorted by username.

reposurgeon(1).

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>. This tool is distributed with reposurgeon; see the project page.