Re: I have end-of-lifed cvsps

On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Eric S. Raymond [off-list ref] wrote:

I'm not sure what counts as a nonsensical branching point. I do know that
Keith left this rather cryptic note in a REAME:

Keith names exactly what we are talking about. At that time, Keith was
struggling with the old xorg cvs repo which these and quite a few
other nasties. I was also struggling with the mozilla cvs repo with
its own gremlins.

Between my earlier explanation and Keith's notes it should be clear to
you. It is absolutely trivial in CVS to have an "inconsistent"
checkout (for example, if you switch branch with the -l parameter
disabling recursion, or if you accidentally switch branch in a
subdirectory).

On that inconsistent checkout, nothing prevents you from tagging it,
nor from creating a new branch.

An importer with a 'consistent tree mentality' will look at the
files/revs involved in that tag (or branching point) and find no tree
to match.

CVS repos with that crap exist. x11/xorg did (Jim Gettys challenged me
to try importing it at an LCA, after the Bazaar NG folks passed on
it). Mozilla did as well.


IMHO it is a valid path to skip importing the tag/branch. As long as
main dev work was in HEAD, things end up ok (which goes back to my
flying fish notes).

cheers,



m
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