[Monotone-devel] A better approach for cvs->mtn? (Was: newbie: Life after cvs-import)

[Larry Hastings]

(Apologies in advance if this is a dumb idea.)


All the recent conversation about importing from CVS to monotone makes me wonder... maybe monotone users (and developers?) would be better off devoting their energies to another approach.

I gather the garden-variety ten-year-old CVS repository is a wretched hive of inconsistency; you must be cautious when dealing with older revisions, especially when migrating all this data to a new SCM.  The SVN developers, their minds twisted by years of supporting CVS, have loads of experience deciphering old CVS repositories.  Unsurprisingly "cvs2svn" is far and away the most successful tool at this sort of migration.

So why not piggy-back on its success?  Skip "cvs2mtn"; instead create "svn2mtn", or enhance tailor's support for svn->monotone conversion as needed.  Then declare the first step in the official "cvs2mtn" conversion process is "convert to Subversion"!  This seems like the best bang-for-the-buck approach, getting rock-solid migration for both CVS and SVN to monotone--which I'm guessing are the top two SCMs these days.

Cheers,


larry