Re: CVS -> SVN -> Git

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Jul 14, 2007, 18:14 UTC
Message-ID: <EC3B307E-EA83-4128-BABD-D9BDB78F987E@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <4699034A.9090603@alum.mit.edu>

On Jul 14, 2007, at 7:09 PM, Michael Haggerty wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Martin Langhoff wrote:
>> On 7/14/07, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>> Incidentally, now that cvs2svn 2.0.0 is nearly out, I am thinking  
>>> about
>>> what it would take to write some other back ends for cvs2svn-- 
>>> turning
>>> it, essentially, into cvs2xxx.  Most of the work that cvs2svn  
>>> does is
>>> inferring the most plausible history of the repository from CVS's
>>> sketchy, incomplete, idiomatic, and often corrupt data.  This work
>>> should also be useful for a cvs2git or cvs2hg or cvs2baz or ...
>>
>> Great to hear that. I'm game if we can do something in this direction
>> - surely we can make it talk to fastimport ;-)
>
> We added some hooks to cvs2svn 2.0 to start working in this direction.
> But I don't really know what information is needed for a git import.
> One quick-and-dirty idea that I had was to have cvs2svn output
> information compatible with cvsps's output, as I believe that several
> tools rely on cvsps to do the dirty work and so could perhaps be
> persuaded to use cvs2svn out of the box.

 From my understanding, piping data to git fast-import would be
a sane gateway to git. The input format of fast-import is document
in [1].

Maybe Shaw Pearce has some comments on that. Shawn did most (maybe all) of the work on git-fast-import.

Simon Hausmann wrote a p4 importer that uses fast-import as its backend. Maybe, Simon can give hints how to get started.

I have no experience with neither git-fast-import nor the p4 importer but would be happy to test any improved way of importing cvs to git. I experienced problems using git-cvsimport on a rather large cvs repository. Hence it would be a real test of the superior capabilities of cvs2svn.

	Steffen

[1] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-fast-import.html