First, what specifically do you consider messy, about it? I have no changelog to reference, but there are quite a lot of subtle things that I've noticed, that may, or may not be easy to just merge across. (This is why keeping some kind of active log, other than doing a diff is usually a good idea...)

Can we possibly worry about this, after we ensure that people can use both repositories? I think cleaning house with the repos has a bit more priority, than worrying about if we're keeping the master branch. Admittedly, I haven't gone through the pulls other than stuff that Gleeok did, so I don't know what the big offenders are; and I'm not againstusing 2.50.3 to start the changes, as the master branch now lacks the bugfixes in 2.50.3.

We could ice both as branches, make a 2.50.3 master with clean vs files, verified makefiles (checking LF and such), and some basic compiling info, as a new 'master', and roll things from the old master into it the new '2.5+ branch' of 2.50.3, so that 'master' is always the current binary; which is how I understand that Git is supposed to be used, and something that most people would comprehend. That way, we preserve the changes in the present master branch for inclusion, keep a clean 2.50.3 snapshot, and have a working 2.5+ branch.

Once we know that anyone can download, compile, and go, and I make up some docs for compiling--because I know this probably falls under my job description, and I'll be stuck making them--I think that things will go smoother.

My tuppence worth.