From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: esr@thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) Subject: Re: CVS -> SVN -> Git Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:39:49 -0400 Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs Message-ID: <20070715013949.GA20850@thyrsus.com> References: <469804B4.1040509@alum.mit.edu> <46a038f90707132230n120e6392uaf5cd86ff10b6012@mail.gmail.com> <4699034A.9090603@alum.mit.edu> <20070714195252.GB11010@thyrsus.com> <46994BDF.6050803@alum.mit.edu> Reply-To: esr@thyrsus.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Martin Langhoff , Julian Phillips , git@vger.kernel.org, dev To: Michael Haggerty X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Sun Jul 15 03:40:13 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git@gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1I9t5o-0001LO-FY for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Sun, 15 Jul 2007 03:40:12 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757797AbXGOBkI (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:40:08 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1760534AbXGOBkI (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:40:08 -0400 Received: from static-71-162-243-5.phlapa.fios.verizon.net ([71.162.243.5]:59317 "EHLO snark.thyrsus.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757797AbXGOBkG (ORCPT ); Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:40:06 -0400 Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (Postfix, from userid 23) id F32A03C0663; Sat, 14 Jul 2007 21:39:49 -0400 (EDT) Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <46994BDF.6050803@alum.mit.edu> X-Eric-Conspiracy: There is no conspiracy User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.12-2006-07-14 Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: Michael Haggerty : > 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 <20040810031409.GA25564@thyrsus.com> 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? -- Eric S. Raymond