Subject: Re: bug#65241: 30.0.50; Cannot clone NonGNU ELPA

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2023 09:05:44 -0700

[Copyi

Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]> writes:

> As for rewriting coffee-mode's history to avoid the problem: you need to
> convince coffee-mode's upstream to do that first.

This ticket has been open since 2018:

    https://github.com/defunkt/coffee-mode/issues/367

I pinged upstream again now on GitHub.  I couldn't find an email
address, so I couldn't Cc them here.

> [ And you might want to check if coffee-mode is really the only branch
>   that bumps into this problem.  ]

Checking with

    git -c 'fetch.fsck.zeroPaddedFilemode=warn' ${NONGNU_ELPA}

yields only the one warning

    warning: object 2699d230e3b592ae42506d7b5c969a7ac6a4593c: \
    zeroPaddedFilemode: contains zero-padded file modes

> PS: Now that I think about it, maybe there's another way, which is to
> use a *shallow* branch so the old offending commit is not stored in
> `nongnu.git`.
> It would hide all the coffee-mode history starting with (and
> including) 20-May-2010 commit 2a59ce05bd, i.e. most of Chris Wanstrath's
> contributions :-(
> It would also take some help from a Savannah admin, but other than that
> it seems like it would do the trick: basically just add a file
> `.../nongnu.git/shallow` with a single line that says
> `b1c16e50e93c662a12c49ac8f18b607656238361`.

A shallow branch sounds like the best option to me.  It's unfortunate
with the attribution of course, but the full history is preserved on
GitHub, so people can still find it.  We can go back to a regular branch
later, if it gets fixed upstream.