Re: CVS -> SVN -> Git

Michael Haggerty [off-list ref]:

Could you give a quick summary of the relevant differences between CVS
and RCS files in this context?  Then I'd be happy to try to figure out
how bad the situation still is today, and whether it can be easily improved.

I found my copy of the bug report, and I misremembered the problem
slightly.  It turns out to be even more relevant to this 
discussion than I thought.

Thread begins with [off-list ref] on
9 Aug 2004.  The thread title was "RFC -- enhancing cvs2svn to have a
notion of spans of mergeable commits".  Your mailing-list archive
search can't seem to find it, unfortunately.  I'll repost the query
iseparately

Other people have complained about having to convert from SVN to
distributed SCMs, because the SVN model doesn't map so easily to their
favorite.

OK.  But I think that if SVN -> X is hard, CVS -> X is going to be harder.

You are basically suggesting that an SVN repository is the best lingua
franca of the SCM world, which I don't believe.

Not quite.  I'm suggesting it's an appropriate lingua franca for centralized
VCSes with branching, e.g. everything pre-Arch.

                                              The CVS history *does*
have to be deformed a bit to fit into SVN, and an svn2xxx converter
would have to undo the deformation.

Then perhaps the right thing to think about is this: how exactly does
CVS history need to be deformed, and is there some way to express the
lost information as conventional properties or tags?

My idea is not to built (for example) cvs2git; rather, I'd like cvs2svn
to be split conceptually into two tools:

Well, that makes more sense.  But how would whatever the first half outputs
be different from an svn dump file? 
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>