migrating from CVS

[Jos Backus]

    Hi all,

I'm relatively new to VCSes. The only other system I have experience with
besides RCS/CVS is Perforce, or Source Depot as Microsoft calls it.

At work we are looking into switching to a new VCS. The current candidates are
Subversion which is a local favorite, and Bazaar-NG which I am promoting, as
I'm tasked with figuring out its viability for our purposes. I'd like to move
us to a distributed system as I think it added ability and flexibility will be
an advantage to our development process.

So I have been looking into conversion tools and found tailor.  One thing I
noticed immediately is that tailor doesn't handle module targets with
subdirectories, e.g. `foo apps/foo'. This appears to be a bug.

Another issue is that converting CVS branches appears to be a tedious process,
yet this seems a vital aspect of any migration.

				   -= *= -

Some questions:

As I understand it, the Bazaar-NG model is that one has a checkout (tree) for
every branch, whereas with CVS there can be one tree but checket-out files can
be on different branches. We use this feature to introduce new software in an
otherwise stable tree.

Is my understanding of the above correct as far as Bazaar-NG goes?

Say I have a CVS checkout with 1000 files, all of which are on the trunk but
one file lives on a branch. Does this mean that in Bazaar-NG land I would have
two almost identical trees except for the one file?

-- 
Jos Backus
jos at catnook.com