Re: cvs revision number -> git commit name?

From: Aaron Crane <git@aaroncrane.co.uk>
Date: Jan 26, 2010, 22:53 UTC
Message-ID: <bc341e101001261453u16124186i298a53ead0b4eee2@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <hbf.20100126bda0@bombur.uio.no>

Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> When moving from CVS to Git, what's a good way to help Git users
> find an old commit given the original CVS revision number?  Are
> there tools available to help?
>
> One could commit a table with a (file,revision)->commit mapping,
> I suppose something can generate it when importing from cvs?

That's what we decided to do on a recent CVS-to-Git conversion, though like you, we also considered munging the log messages instead. Our jury's still out on whether it was the right decision; we haven't had much cause to use the result yet.

One thing to be aware of (beyond the need to run grep to convert old CVS revision numbers to Git commit IDs) is that there's a good chance the mapping file will pollute the results of `git grep` for some tasks. (We've put the mapping file into our repo, where it's easy to find.) I'm considering gzipping the mapping file as a workaround; that would mean our users will need to use zgrep (or equivalent) to look up CVS revision numbers, which may or may not be a problem in your situation.

I have an initial patch to git-cvsimport that adds a switch to generate the mapping as it goes. I'm currently trying to find time to clean it up and submit it.

-- 
Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/