Moving from CVS - How?

[Carl Van Arsdall]

Michael Haggerty wrote:
> Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote:
>   
>> Basically I'm looking at mercurial as a new SCM for my company.  We're 
>> replacing CVS, a fairly old version of CVS too, so its a nice huge 
>> mess.  I've heard many good things
>> about mercurial so I'm really interested in cloning a repository from 
>> CVS.  Now I've had issues with just about every tool on the mercurial 
>> site, that leaves me wondering what the users feel is the appropriate 
>> method and how they got them to work.  I dug around and it appeared as 
>> though other users had issues with the various tools as well, does 
>> anyone here have a recommendation on converting CVS repositories?
>>     
>
> I'm the main cvs2svn developer.  cvs2svn (http://cvs2svn.tigris.org) can
> deal with just about every psychotic CVS repository that we've ever
> seen.  It doesn't (yet?) have the ability to output directly to
> mercurial, but it can output to Subversion or to git.  Try running
> cvs2svn on your repository to see if it can figure out your repo.
> Assuming it can, then you could think about converting cvs -> git -> hg
> or cvs -> svn -> hg, or even adding hg output to cvs2svn (it shouldn't
> be that much work) or sponsoring hg output.
>   
Ah, interesting that you mention that.  We're playing with subversion 
too, so i'm already messing with the tool.  Its found some repository 
issues i'm cleaning up but i'll give your method a shot.  I'm going to 
assume that the issues your tool is finding is probably what's causing 
some of the other tools to fail too, so once I clean up the issues 
reported by your tool (i'm going through second pass issues with a ton 
of band tag/branches now), I'll try the standard tools again as well. 

And I'll certainly let you all know how it goes.  After the test run 
I'll have plenty more repositories to convert so I'll be looking for the 
easiest/best method :)

Thanks,

Carl

> In any case, let us know how it works out.  And if cvs2svn can't handle
> your repository, file a bug with the cvs2svn project and we'll try to
> fix any problems.
>
> Michael
>