Re: CVS -> SVN -> Git

David Frech wrote:

I have a modest svn repo (about 800 commits) that contains fifteen or
so small projects. It started life as a CVS repo, and as the projects
grew and changed, and as I learned more about CVS, things got moved
around. Later, when I got interested in svn (in 2005) I converted the
repo, using cvs2svn. It got a few things wrong - mostly, that it
thought there was one project in the repo, and created toplevel
trunk/, branches/, and tags/ directories, and lumped everything below
these.

I know this tangential to the main point of your post, but BTW
multiproject conversions were added to cvs2svn in release 1.5.

It took a day and half to get the svn dump parsing right (it's an
egregiously bad format) but only a couple of hours to write the
fast-import backend.

I'm surprised you think that; I find the svn dump format quite easy and
straightforward.  (Of course it assumes some Subversionisms, like easy
deep directory copies, which I can imagine would be annoying in other
contexts.)  What don't you like about the format?

Having done all this, I realized that this is a good way to go.
Separating, as Michael suggests, the "parsing" part from the "commit
generating" part, not only makes the tools easier to write, but makes
them more flexible. If hg or bzr had a git-like fast-import (maybe
they do) it would take me about 35 minutes to target that instead. And
in the process I came across some "missing features" in fast-import,
which Shawn Pearce was able to quickly add.

Yes, fast-import is a very easy-to-write format and looks to be very
well documented.  I don't think that having to write output in
fast-import format would be any kind of a hindrance for such a tool.

Michael