Re: CVS -> SVN -> Git

esr@thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:

So, I hear about plans to make cvs2svn generate something other than
Subversion, and here's my instant reaction:

	    	       	   DON'T DO IT!

This is not because I think Subversion is some kind of final answer to the
VCS problem.  Fame from it -- I'm moving towards Mercurial.  No, the
real reason I think this would be a waste of time is subtler than that.

Subversion, by design, is very good at capturing the metadata from
SCCS and RCS and the various CVS variants floating around.  In fact,
lifting from those into Subversion is basically lossless - the real
problems are that (a) as Michael notes, the data you're losslessly
lifting is scratchy, and (b) as I've noted, you have to use heuristics
to coalesce file histories into changesets and those don't always make
the links they should.

Converting to Subversion might be lossless, but is it really the
most convenient intermediate format for other people to convert
further from?

Even after xxx2svn overcomes the problems (a) and (b) you noted
above, my impression has been that svn2yyy needs to work harder
than necessary to grok the branches/ and tags/ that artificially
are flattened, only because Subversion does not do branches nor
tags, but just represents them as copies.