Re: Pre vcs versions of zsh

[Oliver Kiddle <opk@zsh.org>]

Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 7:33 AM Matthew Martin <[1]phy1729@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     It is possible to add those versions to the history using git replace.

> I think I'd prefer PWS's suggestion of putting them on a vendor branch, rather
> than pasting them in front of Tanaka's initial revision, if the latter is what
> you accomplish by "replace".  (My limited-to-what-I've-previously-done-myself
> git experience is probably showing.)

Replacement references are just data blobs stored in git that tell it to
do things like pretend the parent commit of a commit is something
different. They have to be explicitly pushed and fetched. So essentially
they'd be an optional thing that would chain the separate vendor
branches together in the right order with the later commits.

The first tag in a linear history going back from the present seems to
be zsh-3.1.6-dev-21 but the repository does have tags going back to
3.1.5 with the various 3.1.5-pws-X releases apparently there. It'd be
really great if someone wants to work out what's going on there and tie
it in nicely with replacement references. Given that the -pws releases
were very frequent at the time, it might even be possible to dig patches
out of the -workers archives and reconstruct the history between them,
even if only partially with big fixup jumps. Older history can still be
very useful when trying to understand the code.

If anyone has other old data such as list archives it would be good to
collate it even if all we do is dump it on zero.zsh.org for now. As far
as possible we should try to put the old releases under old/ in the ftp
directory in their original form with original timestamps - using .shar
if that's what was in the usenet posts.

Oliver