Re: git: uh-oh

I wrote:
> Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>> On the contrary, I prefer an obvious indication of "I don't know" to a
>> value that might appear to be authoritative but is really just a guess.
>> It could be that one user copied the file verbatim to the branch and a
>> second user changed the file as part of an unrelated change.

> Hm, I see.

Actually, no I don't see.  That sort of history might be possible in
some SCMs, but how is it possible in CVS?  The only way to get a file
into a back branch is "cvs add" then "cvs commit", and the commit is
recorded, even if the file exactly matches what was in HEAD.  There
is an example in contrib/xml2/sql/xml2.sql.  It was added to HEAD
on 2010-02-28, and then the exact same file was back-patched into 8.4
on 2010-03-01, and the back-patch is visible as a separate action
according to
http://anoncvs.postgresql.org/cvsweb.cgi/pgsql/contrib/xml2/sql/xml2.sql

So I don't see why cvs2git has to produce a manufactured commit here.
It's also a bit distressing that the manufactured commit bogusly
includes a totally unrelated file:

commit b36518cb880bb236496ec3e505ede4001ce56157
Author: PostgreSQL Daemon <webmaster@postgresql.org>
Date:   Sun Feb 28 21:32:02 2010 +0000
   This commit was manufactured by cvs2svn to create branch 'REL8_4_STABLE'.      Cherrypick from master 2010-02-28
21:31:57UTC Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> 'Fix up memory management problems in contrib/xml2.':
contrib/xml2/expected/xml2.out      contrib/xml2/sql/xml2.sql       src/bin/pg_dump/po/it.po
 

(This is from the REL8_4_STABLE history in Max's repository.)
The cherrypicked commit certainly did not include anything in
pg_dump/po/it.po, so what happened here?
        regards, tom lane