Re: cvs2svn conversion directly to git ready for experimentation

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

Jakub Narebski wrote:
> Michael Haggerty wrote:
> Have you contacted Jon Smirl about his unpublished work on cvs2git,
> cvs2svn based CVS to Git converter?

Yes, I am familiar with Jon Smirl's work, and as soon as he let us know
what he was working on, we tried to help.  Unfortunately the cooperation
was not very fruitful.

- While Jon was (unknown to us) working on his git output patch, I was
working on a big cvs2svn rewrite to make cvs2svn more robust and easier
to hack.  By the time he contacted us, his patch did not apply to the
cvs2svn code.  The refactoring that obsoleted the patch, in fact, was
largely to remedy the very same architectural problems that were
hampering his work.

- In my opinion, Jon misdiagnosed the reason for the "fragmented branch
creation" problem that he claimed was preventing a clean conversion to
git, and he felt that we were not interested in fixing the problem.  In
fact, I was working on fixing another problem that I believe was the
*real* reason for the fragmented branch creation.  This fix is
implemented in cvs2svn version 2.0.

> Footnotes:
> ----------
> [*] If I remember correctly authors of cvs2svn were talking about separating
> the code dealing with disentangling CVS repository structure from the part
> translating it into Subversion repository (with its quirks), and the part
> generating Subversion repository.

Yes, this is now done, which was why it was only a couple of days of
programming for me to add a git output option.

Michael