Moving a 5 person dev team from CVS to git

Moving a 5 person dev team from CVS to git

[Francis Galiegue]

Hello,

I work for a software company with a dev team of 5, and right now a CVS 
repository is used for all the code which covers 8 years of history among 52 
modules and 1.6 GB data.

All devs use Eclipse, and its featureful CVS plugin. As for myself, I also 
write to the CVS tree, but in a CVS-to-git-to-CVS cycle (I don't use Eclipse 
but command line). I have talked about git, shown some of its capabilities, 
and my boss agreed to give it a shot, but with the following conditions:

* it must provide CVS access (branching and tagging included), as a transition 
measure;
* there must be an Eclipse plugin.

I have successfully imported all CVS modules into an equivalent number of git 
repositories so far. Unfortunately, I have two problems:

* the git-cvsserver does not support branching and tagging;
* I have successfully built the Eclipse plugin (Java 6, Eclipse 3.4), but am 
unable to make it clone a repository and see it in a project, despite quite a 
few hours googling around (it _does_ clone, I see the repo in the workspace; 
but it's invisible within Eclipse).

Is branching and tagging support a planned feature for git-cvsserver? Also, is 
there a step-by-step guide on using egit to clone an existing repository? 
(I'm a total beginner with Eclipse, so it may well be that I need to google 
some more.)

Thanks,
-- 
fge

Re: Moving a 5 person dev team from CVS to git

[Shawn O. Pearce]

Francis Galiegue <fg@one2team.net> wrote:
> 
> I have successfully imported all CVS modules into an equivalent number of git 
> repositories so far. Unfortunately, I have two problems:
> 
> * the git-cvsserver does not support branching and tagging;
> * I have successfully built the Eclipse plugin (Java 6, Eclipse 3.4), but am 
> unable to make it clone a repository and see it in a project, despite quite a 
> few hours googling around (it _does_ clone, I see the repo in the workspace; 
> but it's invisible within Eclipse).

After a clone is complete you need to import the projects from your
the directory you cloned into.  File->Import; General->Existing
projects; select the directory in your workspace where the repo
is housed, or just select your workspace and let Eclipse search
recursively for the projects.

We'd like to support automatically importing the projects after
the clone is complete, but thus far we haven't put the effort into
restarting the import wizard UI after the download is done.
 
> Is branching and tagging support a planned feature for git-cvsserver?

No.  Nor is it likely to ever get added.  Development on
git-cvsserver is stalled as the code is complete enough for anyone
who actively uses it today.  Patches for it are welcome if you are
willing to take over development and maintenance of it.  But its
more-or-less frozen at this point.

> Also, is 
> there a step-by-step guide on using egit to clone an existing repository? 
> (I'm a total beginner with Eclipse, so it may well be that I need to google 
> some more.)

No, not yet.  You could try adding it to the egit wiki page(s):

  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/EclipsePlugin

-- 
Shawn.