WARNING: This question involves messing with aspects of Paratext that weren’t intended to be messed with by the developers. Don’t try this at home!
Background:
Our project decided to use the migration from PT7 to PT8 to correct a number of long-time problems we’ve had. Namely, to remove a number of sensitive usernames from the project and to change the project shortcode to something sensible (before it was a somewhat random name). In the process of using the Convert tool inside of PT, I discovered that there were some problems within the Mercurial data in our project history, and these problems kept the conversion process from completing. I worked with the developers for a while, but determined that no matter what I tried I couldn’t get the Convert tool to succeed (and each attempt was taking 12+ hours).
Solution:
In researching Mercurial, I discovered that you can trim early history from the project (using the convert.hg.startrev command). Note that unlike things like the backout command that rolls back the most recent changes, the convert.hg.startrev tool rewrites the hash codes of each revision–meaning that the new repository is completely unique from the old one and can never be merged with it. I acknowledge that, but since we’re switching from PT7 to PT8 and moving from one project shortcode to another, this seems like a good time to create a ‘new’ Mercurial database.
Note that other than me, the tech guy for the project, almost no one in our team ever uses the project history feature in Paratext. This process won’t change the notes, which is really the invaluable history for our team.
I understand that we will no longer have edit history prior to my cutoff date (I’m trimming our revisions from 32,000 down to about 1,000), although if absolutely necessary I’d still have access to the old data via the old project in PT7.
Question:
Can anyone think of any potential problem caused by removing project history which I haven’t considered?
