Re: cvs import

["Jon Smirl" <jonsmirl@gmail.com>]

Let's copy the git list too and maybe we can come up with one importer
for everyone.

On 9/13/06, Markus Schiltknecht <markus@bluegap.ch> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been trying to understand the cvsimport algorithm used by monotone
> and wanted to adjust that to be more like the one in cvs2svn.
>
> I've had some problems with cvs2svn itself and began to question the
> algorithm used there. It turned out that the cvs2svn people have
> discussed an improved algorithms and are about to write a cvs2svn 2.0.
> The main problem with the current algorithm is that it depends on the
> timestamp information stored in the CVS repository.
>
> Instead, it would be much better to just take the dependencies of the
> revisions into account. Considering the timestamp an irrelevant (for the
> import) attribute of the revision.
>
> Now, that can be used to convert from CVS to about anything else.
> Obviously we were discussing about subversion, but then there was git,
> too. And monotone.
>
> I'm beginning to question if one could come up with a generally useful
> cleaned-and-sane-CVS-changeset-dump-format, which could then be used by
> importers to all sort of VCSes. This would make monotone's cvsimport
> function dependent on cvs2svn (and therefore python). But the general
> try-to-get-something-usefull-from-an-insane-CVS-repository-algorithm
> would only have to be written once.
>
> On the other hand, I see that lots of the cvsimport functionality for
> monotone has already been written (rcs file parsing, stuffing files,
> file deltas and complete revisions into the monotone database, etc..).
> Changing it to a better algorithm does not seem to be _that_ much work
> anymore. Plus the hard part seems to be to come up with a good
> algorithm, not implementing it. And we could still exchange our
> experience with the general algorithm with the cvs2svn people.
>
> Plus, the guy who mentioned git pointed out that git needs quite a
> different dump-format than subversion to do an efficient conversion. I
> think coming up with a generally-usable dump format would not be that easy.
>
> So you see, I'm slightly favoring the second implementation approach
> with a C++ implementation inside monotone.
>
> Thoughts or comments?
> Sorry, I forgot to mention some pointers:
>
> Here is the thread where I've started the discussion about the cvs2svn
> algorithm:
> http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=1599
>
> And this is a proposal for an algorithm to do cvs imports independant of
> the timestamp:
> http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=1451
>
> Markus
>
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com