just a quick note which might be interesting for some of the "historians" among us:
While the first commit of our git import of trunk is dated 2006-01-16 and therefore starts ~3 years late older history is not lost!
I found that 0.45.x/0.46.x branches include commit history going back until 2003-10-30 [1] (I guess this is the very start of it all?!).
With git it's even possible to stitch the two histories together! I described the necessary step (it's just one command!) at [2] which allows to achieve a continouous ancestry for all our release branches going back to this very first commit.
I think there's still work to do in making the branch names, for
releases especially, consistent. And there are probably many that can be
deleted. But folks should be able to get back to work using that Git
repository.
A reminder to folk that we have a guide in the Wiki, and I found a
Gitlab cheat sheet on Git as well. Please ask on the mailing list or in
#inkscape-devel if you have issues.