Wading into the Rubicon
This last weekend (and the part of last week that wasn't involved in airplane travel, baby-herding, and working at the most exciting job in the world, I spent most of my time porting Git to Mastodon, then taking all of the code I'd stopped working on when the vendor of my old version control system had a temper tantrum and pulled the free version of the code from the market and migrating it out of that system and over to git archives.
It's interesting what you discover when you migrate things from one version control system to another. It took me several days to tweak the export system so I could accurately capture the changes from one named version to another (the old system supported named tags, but not very well; the only way I could get the changes from one named version to another was to write a script to extract the SCCS revision numbers from the named tags, then use those revision numbers to get patches.
The vast bulk of the commentary that went along with check-ins went the way of the buffalo, because after looking at it several times and giving up in despair, I'd decided that not getting most of the co/ci comments was a fair tradeoff for being able to actually get to the code again.
My git port to Mastodon is still a bit shaky, but it works. So I've deleted the old version control system and am now a pure Git house. And since the software was released under a freeish license (the restrictions in the GPL are actually quite nasty, but the "must release the source" clause is a welcome change from the previous "no source and all of your development comes to a complete halt when the vendor gets up on the wrong side of the bed") it's not likely that the right to use the code will ever be pulled out from under me, which is A Good Thing when it comes to essential development tools.