cvsexportcommit / cvsimport issues

On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 08:29:08PM +1300, Martin Langhoff wrote:

In any case, I'm likely to send occasional patches as I hit the limitations.

That's also the way I use it. We have an official CVS repo, and I'm doing all of my work in git, until it's ready for publication in the central CVS repo.

While we're talking about cvs<->git, I also hit a couple of problems with git-cvsimport, which I did not have time to fully investigate:

- when there are very large files in the CVS repo (eg. a 85MB
tarball), cvsimport timeouts while fetching it (saying the server has
gone away), when accesing via pserver or ssh.  I tried to play with
the socket timeout, but also it helped to reproducibly import a 15MB
file, I could not raise it enough to get the 85MB file.

Hunting for this problem, I found myself asking the question, why it was chosen in the first place to implement a cvs client, instead of using the reference implementation.

I was finally able to workaround this by transfering a copy of the cvsroot to the local machine, but that's not quite practical :)

- the "-k" flag is dangerous as-is, since it overrides any flag
(eg. -kb) set on the files in the cvs repo.  I got a plain
(non-compressed) tarball of sources corrupted because of this, and was
subsequently unable to use -k at all.  Fortunately, I had done the
original cvs imports using -ko, so it was not a problem for me, but we
may want to fix the issue eventually, and at least document this
caveat.

- when doing an incremental import using -P, where the 1st patchset
was just a module creation with a single .cvsignore to allow creation
of a pseudo-vendor-branch, and the 2nd patchset was an import on the
said branch, cvsimport complained that it could not find the branch in
my git repo, and I had to create it manually, whereas while importing
all patchsets in one batch, the branch was created without manual
intervention (but import subsequently failed because of the big file
as mentionned above).  Similarly, still when using -P, using the local
repository copy, importing the initial patchset complained 'cannot
find "origin"' - I prefered to do this initial import using the
pserver access, which worked fine, and did the later imports via the
local repo.

We could thus want to mention in the doc that -P can also be used to help circumvent problems by using for each patchset the most adequate import method :)

- as of cvsps 2.1, patchsets only contain a single tag, even when
there are several of them on the cvs repo.  We should surely document
this shortcoming so people do not get caught by surprise.

Best regards,