Emacs Bazaar repository

[Michael Haggerty]

Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <monnier at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> 
>> Also some important ones (such as EMACS_19_34, EMACS_20_4, and
>> EMACS_21_1) are missing.
> 
> These are due to shortcomings of cvsps.

Please be very careful with conversion tools that are based on cvsps.
It is an admirable attempt at the very difficult job of allowing
incremental operation, but it is known to give significantly incorrect
output in many circumstances.  See for example [1,2,3].  Note that
git-cvsimport is based on a version of cvsps that they improved to fix
some problems, but this version can also output history that is
completely incorrect.

Please consider using cvs2svn for your conversion [4].  It can output to
git-fast-import (and therefore hopefully to bzr-fast-import) [5], it
avoids a number of the known limitations of cvsps which can result in
incorrect history, it can easily handle the emacs CVS repository (at
least when converting to SVN), and it has very many options that can be
used to customize the conversion [6].  It has a long track record of
converting from CVS to SVN (though it can only be used for one-time
conversions).

Having said that, using cvs2svn to output to a DVCS is rather new and
has a couple of known problems.  One is that too many files are added to
branches and tags (because I misunderstood an aspect of the
git-fast-import format); the other is that it creates fixup branches for
all tags even when they are not needed.  I am currently working on both
of these problems, but you might want to wait a bit before using it for
a final conversion.

Whatever tool you use to do the conversion, please check at least the
contents of the latest trunk, tags, and branches before relying on the
conversion output.  I'd hate to see the venerable emacs history
corrupted :-)

Michael

[1] http://marc.info/?l=git&m=118260312708709&w=2

[2] http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/slime-devel/2008-March/007173.html

[3] http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2008-February/004975.html

[4] http://cvs2svn.tigris.org

[5] http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2git.html

[6] http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/features.html