Merge an independent project into a greater one without losing history

Question

I have an independent project, the CPAN module ExtUtils::MakeMaker. It also lives inside Perl. Generally, a release of MakeMaker will be made and Perl will integrate that tarball into its repository. But sometimes Perl will change its copy of MakeMaker and that change will have to go into the CPAN repository. Also the history of MakeMaker inside Perl extends before MakeMaker in github.

Rather than having two repositories, I would like there to be one. To wit, simply commit directly to perl5.git/cpan/ExtUtils-MakeMaker. This solves the release integration problem. The problem becomes preserving history, code archeology is very important to MakeMaker. The github repository has most of the history of MakeMaker. perl5.git has its own history of MakeMaker, also unique and interesting. The two histories overlap.

The problem is this: how do I merge the github MakeMaker repository into the Perl repository while still preserving history for archeological use? Preferably a solution that doesn't involve manually slogging through individual changes (there's thousands).

Thank you.

Answer 1

Check if your repository allows you to tag and branch your code, and check out what they are exactly, they will solve your problems for sure ;-)

Regards.

Answer 2

You can use submodules, or you can use subtree merge (perhaps with the help of third party git subtree tool).