git archimport

If you still have any of these, this is how you escape.

🎯 What & why

git archimport is a one-way importer from GNU Arch (tla/baz) repositories into Git. It exists so you can escape Arch with your history intact.

🧠 Mental model

Think of it as a replay tool: it walks Arch revisions in order and reconstructs them as Git commits in a new repo. After the import, you abandon Arch.

🛠️ Synopsis

    git archimport [-h] [-v] [-o] [-a] [-f] [-T] [-D depth] \
                   [-t tempdir] <archive>/<branch> [<archive>/<branch>...]

Run inside an empty target directory or one already containing a
previous archimport run. Each Arch branch maps to a Git branch.

🎚️ Switches & options

Flag	What it does
`-h`	Show help
`-v`	Verbose; print each revision as it is replayed
`-T`	Use tags for every Arch revision (noisy, but complete)
`-f`	Use fast patchset application where possible
`-o`	Use the old-style branch names (compat with earlier archimport)
`-D <depth>`	Limit ancestry walk to <depth> revisions back
`-t <tempdir>`	Where to stage intermediate trees during import

💡 Use cases

Rescuing a long-dormant GNU Arch project into modern tooling
Forensic archaeology on historical FOSS code that lived in tla/baz
One-shot migration before decommissioning an Arch server
Preserving authorship and timestamps from Arch into Git history

🧪 Examples

Verbose import of one Arch branch

git archimport -v user@example--2004/project--main--0.1

Import with revision tags

git archimport -v -T user@example--2004/project--main--0.1

Limit history depth and stage in /tmp/ai

git archimport -v -D 500 -t /tmp/ai user@example--2004/project--main--0.1

Serve the resulting repo locally for sanity checks

git -C imported daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --listen=127.0.0.1

🎓 Recommendations

Run on a copy: archimport is fragile and benefits from being able to nuke and retry.
Use -v always; silent failures in the middle of a long import are miserable to diagnose.
After import, gc and repack aggressively before pushing anywhere.

🪤 Common pitfalls

archimport requires tla (or baz) installed and reachable; without it nothing works.
Large Arch histories can take hours; -t on fast storage matters.
Author mappings are based on Arch IDs; expect to rewrite with git filter-repo afterward.

🔗 Related modules

📝 Quiz

Hit each option, then Check answers. Score is recorded; Next is always open.