Re: Preserving git history across repositories

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 09:51:23AM -0500, James E Keenan wrote:
> Is it possible to preserve the commit history of a tree of files as
> it moves out of one repository and into another?

This is a bit fiddly but it's quite doable. The steps look something like
this:

- create your new repository, cloned from the 'perl' repository.

- find the files/directories you care about. Delete EVERYTHING else -- not
  just 'git rm -r', but actually wipe out knowledge of those files'
  existence from the history.  One guide to this is here:
  https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data  -- and now that
  you know the name of the git commands to use, you should be able to find
  lots of other documents describing variants to this technique.

- now you should be left with just the one tree in the repo, including all
  commits in the history: ext/Pod-Html.  Now you can move it to its new
  location using a normal 'git mv', and continue with development.

(FWIW, I'd suggest doing only minimal changes at this point - rename the
code to live under lib/, add a Makefile.PL, META.* and Changes, and then
immediately releasing to the CPAN, to mark its move out of core -- and then
continue with cleaning up the code in subsequent releases.)

Thanks for taking this on -- it looks like Pod-Html has wanted a caretaker
for quite some time!