reposurgeon

reposurgeon is an open source and totally free command-line software implemented in Python and designed from the ground up to help application developers edit the history of a version control repository.

Supports all mainstream version control systems

It empowers you to edit past comments and metadata, as well as to remove commits. It supports all mainstream version control systems, including Git, Bazaar, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial and RCS.

The application is also designed to read Subversion dump files and can be used to script production of extremely high-quality conversions from Subversion (SVN) to any supported DVCS.

Getting started with reposurgeon

To use the reposurgeon program on your GNU/Linux distribution, you must first download it from Softoware or via its official website (see link at the end of the article), where it is distributed as a gzipped source tarball (TAR archive).

Save the archive somewhere on your computer, unpack it with your favorite archive manager application, open a terminal emulator software and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softoware/reposurgeon-3.17).

The software doesn’t require configuration or compilation, as an executable is already provided for you on the archive. Run it with the ‘./reposurgeon’ command, then type ‘help’ at the command prompt to see the available options.

reposurgeon comes with a wide range of commands, so in order to see what each one does, type use the ‘help < string >’ command, where < string > must be replaced with the respective command.

Under the hood and supported operating systems

Taking a look under the hood of reposurgeon, we can immediately notice that it has been written in the Python programming language, which means that it’s portable and works well on any UNIX-like operating system, including GNU/Linux, Solaris or BSD. It can be easily optimized for 32-bit or 64-bit hardware architectures (see the README file inside the source archive for details).

What is new in this release:

• The graft command now has a --prune option like unite.

What is new in version 3.17:

• Export support for SRC and RCS.
• Bug fix for automated preservation under hg.
• Bug fix for reparenting and checkout of commits with inline data.

What is new in version 3.4:

• An @amp() function useful for logic-gating in conjunctive expressions.
• A new 'assign' command allows precomputation of expensive selections (there's an 'unassign' as well).
• An exec/eval facility for custom Python extensions.
• Path rename has --relax and --force options to deal with oath collisions.
• A new --changelog option of coalesce can recognize FSF-style ChangeLog files.

What is new in version 3.3:

• Set negation in selections with ~.
• @min() and @max() in selections.
• 'define' by itself lists macros.
• New 'deletes' option in the remove command.

What is new in version 3.2:

• New path rename command.
• List and inspect now take either a leading or following selection.
• Text search selections can now have a B suffix to search blobs.
• Now possible to transplant fileops between commits using remove .. to.
• A date of the form selects all commits and tags that day.
• Macros can now be multiline.

What is new in version 3.1:

• The filter command now has a --replace modifier to avoid regex overhead.
• Associated branches are renamed when a reset or tag is moved or deleted.
• Bug fix for off-by-one error in tags reporting.

What is new in version 3.0:

• Many syntactic features of the language have changed incompatibly. Backward-incompatible language changes are documented on the manual page. 'expunge' and 'unite' commands have been incompatibly improved. New 'strip' command for generating test cases with blobs stripped out New 'reduce' command for topological reduction of test cases. The 'lint' command gets a test for the existence of multiple roots. Selecting a date or action stamp matching multiple commits now matches all. The surgical language now has a macro facility.

What is new in version 2.43:

• "set canonicalize" is now effective during import stream reads.
• Introduced =O, =M, =F selectors for parentless, merge, and fork commits.
• The "multiline" modifier on edit is replaced by the =L selector.
• Selection-set evaluation now short-circuits predicates and is faster.
• Fixed a buggy test that caused the reader to choke on submodule links.

What is new in version 2.42:

• Prevented crash when tagifying a mixed-branch commit.
• svn_no_autoignores -> svn_noautoignores
• Ignore single-rev mergeinfos in Subversion, they're cherry-picks.

Requirements:

• Python