I still use CVS for Source Code Management (SCM) of a few projects (including this web site). The use of CVS originally stemmed from FreeBSD including CVS in base. That inclusion stopped a number of years ago, but I still used CVS from ports, because inertia...
Now, with the new Protectli Debian-based server, maybe it was time to move to something more modern i.e. git. Was there a suitable tool to migrate the CVS repositories, keeping all the historical commits?
Yes, there are a number of possibilities, but they are relatively old, as I suppose nearly everyone else has already moved off CVS. My first stab at migration was based on Eric Raymond's cvs-fast-export. And this worked very well!
cvs-fast-export has a number of dependencies that a
provided script, buildprep, will install for you if on
one of the supported OSes. On Debian, because it has apt, this
script works fine.
The pre-requisites are:
A number of these were already installed on ash. Those that are only
required for cvs-fast-export I'll delete later.
The following incantation was sufficient to migrate to git (bt is an example):
$ cd /rep/cvsroot/bt $ find . | ~/dev/cvs-dast-export-master/cvs-fast-export >/tmp/bt.fi $ cd ~/dev $ mkdir btgit $ cd btgit $ git init $ cat /tmp/bt.fi | git fast-import $ git reset --head master
This creates (as far as I can tell) at least three branches:
master and main are identical, so master can be deleted.
So, I've joined the cool kids, just a few(?) years late.
