XEmacs repositories

[noahfriedman]

As of September 2020, bitbucket.org has lived up to their name and eradicated all of the XEmacs repositories, which were still hosted in Mercurial. I have clones of most or all of them that were probably up to date at the time this happened.

I'm not sure how much effort it would take to accurately import them into git (including fixing any references in change descriptions to commit hash ids and the like). I know that ESR spent almost a year doing this kind of detailed conversion for the GNU Emacs repository when he prepared the migration from bazaar to git. In any case, these sources ought to be preserved for posterity's sake even if the project is so dead that nobody over at xemacs.org cared enough to move them despite almost a year of warning from bitbucket that they were planning this.

I count 141 separate repositories for XEmacs. I'm pondering creating a new user or group here on github and importing them as archived repositories. What do you think?

[tgbugs]

Preserving the XEmacs history would be extremely valuable, as would making the repositories accessible and visible to more people.

[dodona2]

xemacs is dead. Last message on xemacs.org is dated to 2017. go on for gnu-emacs, the present and future.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Sorry, I missed this discussion and only saw it just now.

I have tried to collect XEmacs releases. What I have is here:
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/ftp.xemacs.org/Attic/releases

I would be happy to add more.

[dodona2]

­ thanks a lot! Sorry, I missed this discussion and only saw it just now.I have tried to collect XEmacs releases. What I have is here:https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/ftp.xemacs.org/Attic/releasesI would be happy to add more.—You are receiving this because you commented.Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS or Android.Gesendet mit Firemail.de - Freemail

[skangas]

@noahfriedman Do you still have copies of the repositories? I think it would be worthwhile to add them in addition to the releases that Lars has collected, even if just as tarballs.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Speaking of repository conversion. I'm sure Raymond did the best he could, but if you go back to the earliest commits they don't make a lot of sense. So better preserve the original data as is, in addition to doing any conversion. If Emacs originally used RCS or something, I'd love to see that.

[noahfriedman]

I only have copies of the final mercurial repositories. If there were earlier repository formats in the past (e.g. cvs or bzr) they are probably lost to time now. The conversion from hg to git is much less messy than CVS, but I agree they should be preserved. Perhaps as LFS objects?

I was mirroring them weekly when they went offline, so I think they're up to date. The most recent commits were around March 2020.

[noahfriedman]

It looks like the XEmacs repositories have been migrated and there is some recent activity. The new location is https://foss.heptapod.net/xemacs. It's still managed in Mercurial.

[noahfriedman]

Speaking of repository conversion. I'm sure Raymond did the best he could, but if you go back to the earliest commits they don't make a lot of sense. So better preserve the original data as is, in addition to doing any conversion. If Emacs originally used RCS or something, I'd love to see that.

I still have a tar file of the last state of the CVS repository before it was migrated to Bazaar in 2009.
It's too big to attach here but I've uploaded it to my server. These are all the RCS files dating back to some time in 1990 when rms first started using them. Later, Jim Blandy copied them wholesale into CVS and started using that.