Merged repo for protocol headers? Why are they split?

[Daniel Martin]

On 27 November 2017 at 23:18, Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 09:07:12PM +0100, Daniel Martin wrote:
>> On 22 November 2017 at 07:45, Adam Jackson <ajax at nwnk.net> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2017-11-22 at 10:25 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
>> >> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 03:28:20PM -0800, Dylan Baker wrote:
>> >> > Your script splits each proto into a subdirectory, does it really make sense to
>> >> > do that, or should the final proto package have everything together in the root?
>> >>
>> >> please no! if you merge all repos the history will be messy. With subdirectories
>> >> at least you get a nice git log for each individual repo if you specify the
>> >> directory name.
>> >
>> > Agreed, that'd be a useful property to preserve given how random the
>> > repo and file names are.
>>
>> Just started to test an idea today, to get an even better history. The
>> idea is basically (omitting details):
>> 1. format-patch each commit into a patch, the filename includes the
>> commit time (UTC)
>>    - patches of all repos become sorted and when applying them we get
>> a nice history
>> 2. hammer with sed on the patches
>>    - add a proto prefix to the subject
>>    - change initial position of files (i.e. move headers into
>> include/X11/..., txts into doc/), no need to move files later
>
> if there are any commit messages that reference others ("Reverts commit
> abcd123") you lose the reference because the sha is now different. so I'd
> rather not do a re-commit of everything.
>
>> Surprisingly, this works pretty good for the first commits (reduced
>> testing surface for the beginning). Last stop was at renames of files.
>> But, I got another idea, which I can test tomorrow.
>>
>> The merge into subdirs looks straight forward and we can do that if I
>> find a show-stopper. Deal?
>
> have you looked at subtree merges? Keeps the repo history for each merged
> repository and the one from the top-level repository. And it forces you to
> merge into a directory anyway, so that's a win right there.

Oh? No, didn't knew that before. But, tested it:
$ git remote add -f randrproto
git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/randrproto
$ git subtree add --prefix=randrproto/ randrproto master

The history in the toplevel looks good. But, log -p shows the original
paths in the commits. Okay, it doesn't rewrite history. I can deal
with that.
Though,
$ git log (--graph) randrproto/randr.h
just shows one commit from the subtree add.

Am I doing it wrong?