Migrating CVS repositories to Bazaar

[Doug Lee]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 09:54:25AM -0800, Colin D Bennett wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:31:30 -0500
> "J. Bobby Lopez" <jbl at jbldata.com> wrote:
> 
> > What is the current most popular method of converting CVS repositories to
> > Bazaar? (which is compatible with bzr 1.11)
> > 
> > I've tried "bzr-fastimport", "bzr-svn" (after converting CVS to SVN with
> > cvs2svn), etc, but I've run into difficulties with each of them.
> 
> I've had good results with Tailor.

My experiences:

Tailor works nicely, at least for single-branch projects and maybe for
multi-branch ones, as long as you don't need tags.  Last time I used
Tailor, it dit better than anything else at dealing with text vs.
binary file handling but left out my CVS tags.

cvsps-import  IIRC, this one looked very promising to me but gave me
trouble with line endings and, though it did handle tags, it put them
into something like a branch instead of using the newer `bzr tag'
system.  Arguably one could patch that up with a small post-processing
program though.  The line ending issue stopped me here.

Fast-import:  I need to look at that again.  When I looked last, it
was mostly for Git and Subversion.  One could use the Git support to
import into Bazaar, but I had trouble finding sufficient documentation
on that process.  It's probably better documented now.

I don't remember if I tried bzr-svn.

A note on my line ending issues:  My CVS repositories are maintained
in FreeBSD.  Some projects are checked out exclusively in Windows,
some in Unix, and some in both.  Binary files in CVS are marked with
-kb as should be the case.  I tried various combinations of cvsps-import
setups--all Unix, all Cygwin, cvsps Cygwin and bzr Windows (I did not
locate a strictly Windows cvsps I think), etc.  I ultimately want CVS
-kb files to remain unaltered and non-kb files to be treated, per
project, as I specify.  That's not a feature I've seen in any of these
converters to date.


-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
SSB BART Group           doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com   http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"It is not the mountain in the distance which makes you want to stop
walking; but the grain of sand in your shoe."  --Anon