Subject: Re: Fwd: Fwd: git cvsimport implications

From: Michael Haggerty <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 07:52:03 +0200

On 05/17/2013 06:10 PM, Eugene Sajine wrote:
> MIchael, sorry for dup - didn't press reply all for the first one.
> 
>>
>> So what are you going to do, use cvsimport whenever you cannot *prove*
>> that it is wrong?  You sure have low standards for your software.
> 
> 1. You are making assumptions and conclusions that have no grounds.
> I asked for help understanding what are the problems of cvsimport.
> Never i said i'm not willing use cvs2git. Never i said I'm happy to have
> problems in my git repos. So, this "low standard" punch was... not necessary.

I didn't mean to be offensive.  I meant it more in the sense of "you
deserve to expect more from your software".

> 2. I started to use cvsimport because it was the tool *provided with
> git* about three years ago.
> By that time i didn't find any better and simpler tool to use and
> those implications were uknown for me,
> they were brought up to my attention just recently.
> CVS is not good for branches, so most of our projects didn't have any
> cvs branches.
> So for majority of those it seems that the cvsimport did it's job just fine.
> Now we are going to try to migrate some projects that are using CVS
> branches heavily.
> That concerns me, so i'm looking for better tool.

The Git test suite (tests t/t960?-*.sh) demonstrates some of the known
problems with cvsimport, and those failures are summarized in the
manpage for git-cvsimport(1).  Not all of the problems are related to
branches and tags.  There might be more problems; I simply documented a
few that I found relatively quickly then I stopped looking.

> 3. Is there a way to have the whole plumbing with the
> blobfiles and dumpfiles and consequent git fast-import wrapped into
> nice command like:
> 
> git cvsimport -C path/to/my/new/shiny/gitrepo
> 
> Or are there any particular reasons why end user must deal with blob
> and dump files and do fast-import afterwards?

There are benefits to the split blobfile/dumpfile approach for some
users, so I wouldn't want to get rid of that possibility.  But there's
no reason I wouldn't accept a patch that provides an option to convert
as you describe.  Alternately, it would take only a few lines of script
to automate it yourself.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
[email-masked]
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/