Re: [higgins-dev] Research on how Higgins could convert from CVS to SVN

["Jim Sermersheim" <jimse@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not very concerned about caveat #1 because I don't even know how (with CVS) to view a grouped set of files that were part of a single commit.  #2 sounds a little dicey.
 
>>> "Mary Ruddy" <mary@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 11/09/07 9:20 AM >>> 
When the Higgins project was started, Eclipse only offered CVS, not SVN. So
even though SVN has advantages, we had to use CVS.  SVN is now available to
projects on request.
 
SVN has some features that will give us more control over the build process.
 
For example: Andy "used to use CVS on another project and moved to SVN.
Originally his project was hesitant, but they found that it made doing
nightly builds much easier as a nightly build can be kicked off on a
particular revision. Didn't need to worry about tagging, while letting
developers check in ahead of the builds.  Also can get atomic commits (all
or nothing).. Also able to use SVN revision in the file name of a resulting
build so that if someone subsequently reported a bug, we could go back to
the exact source for the build".
 
On the Higgins developers call yesterday, we discussed the pros and cons.
Dev notes to follow. We had a guest speaker on the dev call from the
Financial Services Technology Consortium and we agreed to let him review the
notes on his presentation to ensure accuracy, so the notes are delayed. 
 
During the call Andy was nominated to research preparations for doing a dry
run of the conversation as part of formally preparing for any actual
conversion.  More to follow.
 
Below is the overview information I got on the process from Matt Ward, one
of the Eclipse web masters:  
 
 
Basically a project needs to decide on it's developers list, and then the PL
sends in a request to have the repository moved from cvs to svn. 

We use the cvs2svn tool, but there are a couple of caveats from the

documentation:

1) CVS doesn't record complete information about your project's history. 

For example, CVS doesn't record what file modifications took place within
the same CVS commit. Therefore, cvs2svn attempts to infer from CVS's
incomplete information what /really/ happened in the history of your
repository. So the second goal of cvs2svn is to reconstruct as much of your
CVS repository's history as possible.

2)One of the most important topics to consider when converting a repository
is the distinction between binary and text files. If you accidentally treat
a binary file as text *your repository contents will be corrupted*.

For more details check out  <http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html>
http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html

-Matt.