I have end-of-lifed cvsps

On the git tools wiki, the first paragraph of the entry for cvsps now reads:

  Warning: this code has been end-of-lifed by its maintainer in favor of
  cvs-fast-export. Several attempts over the space of a year to repair
  its deficient branch analysis and tag assignment have failed.  Do not
  use it unless you are converting a strictly linear repository and
  cannot get rsync/ssh read access to the repo masters. If you must use
  it, be prepared to inspect and manually correct the history using
  reposurgeon.

I tried very hard to salvage this program - the ability to remote-fetch CVS repos without rsync access was appealing - but I reached my limit earlier today when I actually found time to assemble a test set of CVS repos and run head-to-head tests comparing cvsps output to cvs-fast-export output.

I've long believed that that cvs-fast-export has a better analyzer than cvsps just from having read the code for both of them, and having had to fix some serious bugs in cvsps that have no analogs in cvs-fast-export. Direct comparison of the stream outputs revealed that the difference in quality was larger than I had prevously grasped.

Alas, I'm afraid the cvsps repo analysis code turns out to be crap all the way down on anything but the simplest linear and near-linear cases, and it doesn't do so hot on even those (all this *after* I fixed the most obvious bugs in the 2.x version). In retrospect, trying to repair it was misdirected effort.

I recommend that git sever its dependency on this tool as soon as possible. I have shipped a 3.13 release with deprecation warnings fot archival purposes, after which I will cease maintainance and redirect anyone inquiring about cvsps to cvs-fast-export.

(I also maintain cvs-fast-export, but credit for the excellent analysis code goes to Keith Packard. All I did was write the output stage, document it, and fix a few minor bugs.)