files missing after converting a cvs repository to git

Hi

One of the prrojects I am involved with is currently looking into migrating from cvs to git, therefore we have been investigating this by setting up a git repository that tracks cvs, however there are some very strange things going on and I was hoping someone could offer some insight into what is going on.

I use the following git cvsimport command to import the repository:

$ git cvsimport -v -a -i -k -d:pserver:user@server:port/path/to/cvs/repo -C /path/to/new/git/repo module

this ran successfully with no warnings or errors. However, when I checkout the new git repository that are several files missing from the git checkout that are present in the cvs checkout.

Does anyone know why this would happen, or how to find out? This is a major problem because we will be unable to migrate to cvs until this can be solved.

Cheers

Adam

Adam Mercer wrote:

Has the CVS repo been tampered with in the past? If so, it's entirely possible that checking out and working with CVS works just fine, but getting history into coherent changesets is impossible.

Can you checkout the offending (old) revisions using CVS? If so, there is indeed a bug in the cvs-importer. Otherwise, your CVS repo is hosed and you're reduced to running whatever conversion tool does the best job if you want to maintain history.

cvs2svn is apparently quite good at getting even the weirdest history right. Perhaps you can try that and then running "git svn" on the resulting svn repo?

Good luck. You'll probably need it :-/

Andreas Ericsson wrote:

cvs2svn has git output now (I think it is actually fast-import output)

Jakub Narebski wrote:

Correct. See http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2git.html for more info. I suggest using the trunk version of cvs2svn for conversions to git.

Please note, however, that cvs2svn can only handle one-time conversions (i.e., not tracking a live CVS repository incrementally).

Michael

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 05:46, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Thanks, I'll look into this for creating the final git repos.

Cheers

Adam

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 01:08, Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> wrote:

Unfortunately yes. Thats what I thought, and was afraid, was going on. I've managed to get things working by restoring some of the missing files ,v files from a backup and regenerating the tracking repositories. Then I had to remove the files in question from cvs and readd them, git cvsimport then saw these files.

Thanks, I'll give cvs2svn a go.

Cheers

Adam

Adam Mercer wrote:

Ouch. In that case, all bets are off when it comes to correctly cloning the history, I'm afraid. On the up-side, if you get a oneshot conversion done properly you can easily convert it to something else later in case git doesn't meet your needs, and it might even be easier to add commit support to "git cvsserver" than it is to fix your broken repository (it might be in there already; I don't use it so I don't know), in which case you can use CVS with a git object store.