webwml in git?

[Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at>]

        Hi!

 Last week I wondered how much space a complete git conversion would
take - and I was quite surprised:

#v+
$ du -hs webwml*
325M    webwml
416M    webwml.git
819M    webwml.svn
#v-

 Granted, the whole conversion took me almost 3 days, none-constant
running on my laptop. webwml is the old CVS part, webwml.svn the thing
that's on alioth (just a trunk/webwml checkout, to be nice, but it
doesn't really make it any better). 

 The increase in diskspace was far less than what I expected. Please
keep in mind that some years ago there were some binary data
incorporated that were stripped off later again because of people
complaining about their size - those are also included in here.

 Personally I think this is something that can be considered as not too
bad alternative, especially since everything can be done offline because
we do in fact have everything offline available and we don't need
strange tricks with post-commit hooks setting some properties that are
needed to count the changing revisions between commits, one of the major
problems with doing offline stuff with a svn conversion (which simply
explodes in size, too).

 I haven't tried to split it up into submodules because I am not too
familiar with that git feature and how to work with it, but given that
it's not even a third bigger in size for the complete history (which
goes way back to July 1998, well over 10 years and over 83k commits!)
I think this is something more than acceptable.

 Is this something that could be worked upon? 300M less than with svn
with lots of benefits is something that I would really like to put some
efforts into, and if someone is familiar with how submodules work so
that translators can just checkout english and their language instead of
the whole junk (I though would also like to see how many active
translators we have that don't have the space for a full checkout) that
would be great, too.

 If you like to take a look I could push that somewhere so others could
take a look at. Please mind that if you like to start working on it, do
it in a branch and not the main part, otherwise updating won't work...

 So long!
Rhonda
P.S.: Had done git-cvsimport -v -k -d :ext:alfie@cvs.debian.org:/cvs/webwml -m -a webwml -C webwml.git
P.P.S.: Yes, -k kills the keywords, but they aren't used by any scripts
   TTBOMK, are mostly cosmetic from what I can see.