I'm developing a software library that I began during my PhD and used in my thesis. I've since started a research position and, as an experiment, I wanted to try rewriting parts to see if I could simplify it. This turned out to be way more successful than I expected. I rewrote years of work in a matter of weeks, and the end result is much cleaner than what I had before.
Now I want to make my rewrite public, but I'm not sure what to do about the revision history. I reference specific commits in the old version in my thesis, so I'd like to have those preserved for posterity (and so I can laugh at my junk code later.) I can think of 3 options:
- Delete all the old code in one commit. Extract all the commits from the rewrite as patches and apply them one-by-one to the old repository.
- Make a tag branch for the old code, say
my-lib-0.0.1
, explaining that it was a nascent version of the code from when I was young and foolish. Add the rewrite as a remote for the old code, thengit reset --hard rewrite/master
. This will replace the revision history of the old code with that of the rewrite. - Explain in the
README
for the old repo that it's deprecated, and keep the rewrite in an entirely new repo.
I don't like option 3, as I'd rather have everything in the same repository. Additionally, there is still a fair amount of shared code between the old and new versions. Option 2 has the virtue of keeping the revision history looking fairly clean (users won't have to clone 400+ commits of garbage from when I didn't know what I was doing) but keeping the history there in the unlikely event that someone does want to see it. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of "rewriting history", and to avoid cloning garbage commits I can always tell people to do shallow clones.
Which of these options is the least bad? Are there others that I haven't considered?