Talk about "git cvsimport" in the cvs migration docs

We should add a lot more information about how you copy repositories,
pulling and pushing, merging etc.  Oh, well.  I'm not exactly known for
my documentation skills. Maybe somebody else will help me..
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Linus Torvalds 2005-06-07 15:52:06 -07:00
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CVS annotate. Git for CVS users
=================
Ok, so you're a CVS user. That's ok, it's a treatable condition, and the
first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. The fact that
you are reading this file means that you may be well on that path
already.
The thing about CVS is that it absolutely sucks as a source control
manager, and you'll thus be happy with almost anything else. Git,
however, may be a bit _too_ different (read: "good") for your taste, and
does a lot of things differently.
One particular suckage of CVS is very hard to work around: CVS is
basically a tool for tracking _file_ history, while git is a tool for
tracking _project_ history. This sometimes causes problems if you are
used to doign very strange things in CVS, in particular if you're doing
things like making branches of just a subset of the project. Git can't
track that, since git never tracks things on the level of an individual
file, only on the whole project level.
The good news is that most people don't do that, and in fact most sane
people think it's a bug in CVS that makes it tag (and check in changes)
one file at a time. So most projects you'll ever see will use CVS
_as_if_ it was sane. In which case you'll find it very easy indeed to
move over to Git.
First off: this is not a git tutorial. See Documentation/tutorial.txt
for how git actually works. This is more of a random collection of
gotcha's and notes on converting from CVS to git.
Second: CVS has the notion of a "repository" as opposed to the thing
that you're actually working in (your working directory, or your
"checked out tree"). Git does not have that notion at all, and all git
working directories _are_ the repositories. However, you can easily
emulate the CVS model by having one special "global repository", which
people can synchronize with. See details later, but in the meantime
just keep in mind that with git, every checked out working tree will be
a full revision control of its own.
Importing a CVS archive
-----------------------
Ok, you have an old project, and you want to at least give git a chance
to see how it performs. The first thing you want to do (after you've
gone through the git tutorial, and generally familiarized yourself with
how to commit stuff etc in git) is to create a git'ified version of your
CVS archive.
Happily, that's very easy indeed. Git will do it for you, although git
will need the help of a program called "cvsps":
http://www.cobite.com/cvsps/
which is not actually related to git at all, but which makes CVS usage
look almost sane (ie you almost certainly want to have it even if you
decide to stay with CVS). However, git will want at _least_ version 2.1
of cvsps (available at the address above), and in fact will currently
refuse to work with anything else.
Once you've gotten (and installed) cvsps, you may or may not want to get
any more familiar with it, but make sure it is in your path. After that,
the magic command line is
git cvsimport <cvsroot> <module>
which will do exactly what you'd think it does: it will create a git
archive of the named CVS module. The new archive will be created in a
subdirectory named <module>.
It can take some time to actually do the conversion for a large archive,
and the conversion script can be reasonably chatty, but on some not very
scientific tests it averaged about eight revisions per second, so a
medium-sized project should not take more than a couple of minutes.
Emulating CVS behaviour
-----------------------
FIXME! Talk about setting up several repositories, and pulling and
pushing between them. Talk about merging, and branches. Some of this
needs to be in the tutorial too.
CVS annotate
------------
The core GIT itself does not have a "cvs annotate" equivalent. The core GIT itself does not have a "cvs annotate" equivalent.
It has something that you may want to use when you would use It has something that you may want to use when you would use