On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 06:44:01PM -0400, Adam Goode wrote:
> The most reliable way I have found for CVS transitions is cvs2svn followed
> by git-svn. Both tools are quite good at what they do.

I tried cvs-fast-export and reposurgeon last night, it got something out
but I haven't dug too deeply into the resulting repository. Anything
after 2007 looks pretty good, things get worse as you go further back.

fast-export failed badly on some CVS tags that had '()' characters, so I
had to massage the ,v files before it succeeded. It also is reporting
quite a few errors about revision on unnamed branches.

> Can you make the raw CVS repo available somewhere? I might have some time
> to play with this.

Yes, I'll make some archives of the Coda, LWP, RPC2 and RVM
repositories. An interesting bit is that LWP, RPC and RVM originally
were part of the Coda tree, but at some point got split off into their
own repositories, I believe by copying the underlying RCS from one CVS
repo to the new ones.

Currently we use git-submodule to pull them back into the main source
tree at build time. Ideally I would want them merged back into the main
Coda repo, especially because quite often a change in LWP propagated
all the way back up to Coda. I have some ideas on how to do this that I
may play around with. If the library RCS files actually do contain the
full history one approach would be to copy the ,v files back into the
Coda CVS tree and see what fast-export/reposurgeon come up with as a
reasonable history.

I am pretty sure that at points in the history renames were done by
directly moving the ,v files around, to preserve edit history for that
particular file. But it does mean that it is quite unlikely that an old
revision can be checked out and built.

I will probably start a coda-repo-conversion repository to track scripts
and configuration settings needed to reproducably perform the conversion.

Jan