Re: Git: CVS to Git import

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 12, 2011, 00:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20111112002426.GA6602@elie.hsd1.il.comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <m3obwimdi1.fsf@localhost.localdomain>

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

> Jvsrvcs <jvsrvcs@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

>> Git:  CVS to Git import
>> 
>> We are moving from CVS to Git and want to know if anyone has had any
>> experience there doing this and could share do's  / dont's, best practices
>> when doing the initial import.

[...]

> I think that Eric S Raymond "DVCS Migration Guide"
>
>    http://www.catb.org/esr/dvcs-migration-guide.html

That page says that "git cvsimport" tends to be your best bet. But my experience is exactly the opposite --- git-cvsimport can make a lot of mistakes, some of them documented in the ISSUES section of its manpage, and it is hard to notice until later.

I've have good experiences using cvs2git from <git://repo.or.cz/cvs2svn.git> (but note that it does not support incremental imports).

> and reposurgeon tool (to clean up conversion artifacts)
>
>    http://www.catb.org/esr/reposurgeon/

Last time I checked, reposurgeon loads the entire history in memory. For projects with a longer history, "git filter-branch" might be a better fit.

By the way, thanks for writing. If your experience results in some ideas for improving Documentation/gitcvs-migration.txt page, we'll probably be happy to take them. :)

Good luck, Jonathan