FreeBSD's ports migration to git and its impact on HardenedBSD

Submitted by Shawn Webb on

FreeBSD completed their ports migration from subversion to git. Prior to the official switch, we used the read-only mirror FreeBSD had at GitHub[1]. The new repo is at [2]. A cursory glance at the new repo will show that the commit hashes changed. This presents an issue with HardenedBSD's ports tree in our merge-based workflow.

I'm going to archive our old ports repo[3] and create a new repo[4]. Due to the nature of our changes and how far back our history goes, creating a new repo is necessary. Attempting to do a `git merge --allow-unrelated-histories` works, but brings gitlab to its knees, eventually failing.

For projects downstream of HardenedBSD using the same kind of merge-based workflow, you will need to effectively do the same thing we did. Here's the process I took:

  1. Match the last commit of the old repo (e7ad26d92beff76bbead7b6b675ad5c551e86fa9) with its corresponding commit in FreeBSD's old ports repo (4010f7bbc03638d71781ce091bf40a0907fa12fe).
  2. Clone FreeBSD's new repo to a temporary location
  3. Generate a diff between the old repo and the new: git diff 4010f7bbc03638d71781ce091bf40a0907fa12fe e7ad26d92beff76bbead7b6b675ad5c551e86fa9
  4. Create the hardenedbsd/main branch
  5. Apply the diff created in step 3
  6. Commit and push

Instead of committing directly to the master branch, we created a new branch "hardenedbsd/main". Upstream's branch in our repo is "freebsd/main".

I apologize for the breakage downstream to us. I made a "best effort" attempt at trying to prevent the breakage, but the ports repo is just too large to do it.

Going forward, please use the new repo at [4]. No merge requests and bug reports for the old repo at [3] will be accepted.

I plan to restore the every-six-hour autosync script this weekend. While there's still dust to settle, I plan to do the syncs myself. The dust should be settled this weekend.

[1]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/
[2]: https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/
[3]: https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/hardenedbsd-ports/
[4]: https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/ports