Working with Git and CVS in a team.

From: Mirko Stocker <mirko.stocker@hsr.ch>
Date: Jun 13, 2008, 14:33 UTC
Message-ID: <200806131633.34980.mirko.stocker@hsr.ch>

Hello,

Our team works on an existing project that's in CVS, but we don't have the permissions to commit directly to it. We still need to make changes and want to stay as up to date as possible, so we are trying to use git to track the CVS repository and to collaborate inside the team.

Now, I'm quite new to git, so I'm not sure if the solution I created is "correct", not way too complicated, or if there are problems waiting for us.

git-cvsimport seems to be the solution, so I've established the following structure:

+-----------------+
| dev.eclipse.org |
+-----------------+
        ^
        | (1)
        |         (2)                      (3)
+---------------+      +---------------+        +------------+
| ifs:/from-cvs | ---> | ifs:/git-proj | <----- | Merge-Dude |
+---------------+      +---------------+        +------------+
                          /           \
                         /             \
                        /               \
                    +------+         +------+
                    | User |   (4)   | User |
                    +------+         +------+

1) I use git-cvsimport to update the repository every night. /git-proj
   is a "clone --bare" of the /from-cvs repository.

2) After the import, I push the changes from CVS to /git-proj using
   'git push /git-proj origin'.

This first two steps can be done with a cronjob, there shouldn't be any conflicts.

3) Then we have the role of a "Merge-Dude" who pulls the changes from
   /git-proj and uses 'git merge origin/origin' to update his master.
   If there are any conflicts, he resolves them and pushes everything
   back to the master at /git-proj.

4) The users can just push and pull from /git-proj.

>From time to time, we can use 'git diff origin/origin' to get a patch

with all the changes we made and have to send upstream.

What do you guys think, is this approach feasible?

What I don't like is how we have to make the upstream patch(es). Is there an easy way we can get multiple patches, lets say for each commit we made? Or is it easier to make a lots of branches and to then create a patch from the diff between the branch and origin/origin?

Wow, this got longer than I expected. Thanks in advance!

Mirko Stocker