How to build the history of an old project in git?

Question

I have a project that I want to put on Git. We have many old “zip” snapshots of the project that can be used to build the foundation of the supposed historical line, plus several even older bits, many of which I have yet to find, which I would still like to add to the story I'm building .

It’s not so difficult to create a line of new zips [ copy, commit, copy, commit, .. etc. ] immediately, but how to retrospectively translate (?) into an older story? I would like the story to look like I typed them in chronological order, so some re-write might be required.

Since the team is very small and located next to each other, we can easily cope with the transition from a draft to the “correct” version, so this is a practical exercise at startup and refinement of the “still find” parts as soon as everyone started using git (I would prefer to use git, waiting until the found story is found ;-).

So the question is, how do I retrospectively transplant an early story and then rewrite the entire repo so that the transplant does not show up? I know that this will re-write all SHA1 identifiers.

Answer 1

You probably want to do what is described here: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/33868/script-tool-to-import-series-of-snapshots-each-being-a-new-edition- into-git-po

but add the --date parameter to git commit so that it sets any date from the zip file.

Answer 2

git rebase -i (interactive reboot) allows you to make many useful history changes. Just keep in mind that this will ruin any branches that were made before the reinstallation, forcing everyone to reinstall those branches as well.