git-weave, a tool for synthesizing repositories from fossil tarballs

Welcome to my first new-project release of the year, git-weave. It’s a polished and documented version of the script I used to reconstruct the early history of INTERCAL five years ago – see Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree for the details on that one.

git-weave can be used to explode a git repository into a sequence of per-commit directory trees accompanied by a metadata file describing parent-child linkage, holding committer/author/timestamps/comment metadata, and carrying tags.

Going in the other direction, it can take the same sequence of trees plus metadata file and reconstruct the live repository. Round-tripping is lossless.

What it’s really useful for is reconstructing a partial but useful ancient history of a project from before it was put under version control. Find its release archives, synthesize a metadata file, apply this tool, and you get a repository that can easily be glued to the modern, more continuous history.

Yes, you only get a commit for each release tree or patch you can dig up, but this is better than nothing and often quite interesting.

Nifty detail: the project logo is the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for a weaver’s shuttle.