GCC's Conversion To Git: "Within The Realm Of The Practically Achievable"

It was back in July 2018 that GCC's conversion to Git was becoming a massive headache and now more than a year later it's looking like that switch from Subversion to Git is still weeks if not months from becoming official.

Last year the GCC conversion to Git was blamed on high DDR4 RAM prices and then evaluating a port of the conversion utility from Python to Go. That GCC Git port work being led by Eric S Raymond was then boosted earlier this year after upgrading to a Threadripper system with more RAM and also going ahead with the Reposurgeon rewrite in Go. But even months after that milestone, the reworked Reposurgeon is still a work-in-progress but the end may be in sight.

ESR has issued a new status report today saying he's in the last stages of qualifying his Go port, he's currently working on debugging a "extractor harness" peripheral feature, topological sorting of commits is still being done, and various other bugs.

He ends this latest status report with "I think I'm looking at somewhere between 7 and 14 days until I can start work on the GCC move again. Getting to this point has taken a year. However, the hopes of a big speedup look like they'll be borne out. Preliminary indications are that my test runs will be at least 12x
faster. In part due to Go and in part due to a new Great Beast, a 16-core Threadripper machine with 128GB ram. Finishing the move should now be within the realm of the practically achievable."

We'll see how long that takes or if the GNU Compiler Collection ends up going with an alternative conversion process for finally developing with a Git workflow.