ESR Switches To Threadripper But His GCC SVN-To-Git Conversion Could Still Take Months

It looks like the saga of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) source tree from SVN to Git isn't over yet and could still take months until completion.

As written about last week, a Linaro developer worked on a Bash script leveraging Git-SVN for converting GCC's SVN to Git as while Eric S Raymond has been working on the effort for many months using his homegrown "Reposurgeon" utility, it hasn't yet panned out. Reposurgeon in last year's form was too memory hungry and slow while ultimately he began rewriting the tool in Golang in hopes of addressing these issues.

Eric S. Raymond has now commented on the Git-SVN-driven effort and has called it unsafe. Git-SVN can reportedly run into troubles of properly handling merges into the code-base and thus presents problems for nicely preserving the source tree's history.

ESR intends to continue work on his Reposurgeon-driven GCC conversion, well, unless the GCC developers go ahead anyways with their alternative conversion plans. But as for when the Reposurgeon conversion would be complete, that might not be until around the end of the year. ESR says there's "about a 65% chance" it could be done by the GNU Tools Cauldron conference this September. He's looking for help from Golang developers in assisting in translating his code to Go, which could speed up the effort.

ESR also notes that System76 provided him with a Thelio desktop computer featuring an AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor, which is helping tackle the GCC problem, albeit he's bottlenecked now by the Golang rewrite as opposed to CPU/RAM processing power.

More details in this mailing list thread.

Hopefully by the GCC 10 release next year their Git workflow will be in order.