Re: [Monotone-devel] cvsimport branch reconstruction

[Juan Jose Comellas]

I'm experimenting with a repository for a client of mine, which has about 6 
years of commits. If everything goes well I also plan to migrate my company's 
repository, which is fairly big. I'm currently evaluating Monotone, Darcs and 
Mercurial as replacements for CVS, because I don't want to spend a single 
extra second working (suffering?) with it. Our current workflow requires easy 
branching, merging and cherry picking. I haven't decided yet, but right now 
my first option is Monotone, which I have been using for smaller projects for 
over a year, closely followed by Darcs.

So far, my lists of pros and cons are:

Monotone:
Pros: Great merging algorithm; very reliable (it has never corrupted my 
repository/DB); clean source code and written in a language I know.
Cons: Slow on some operations and for initial pulls, especially with big 
repositories; not very flexible for external I/O (lack of support for HTTP as 
transport protocol); complex setup when having multiple DBs and a single port 
for connections.

Darcs: 
Pros: Great support for cherry picking; has a set of more mature third-party 
tools (Eclipse plugin, Trac integration, etc.); seems to be the one with the 
biggest mindshare; very flexible for external communications.
Cons: The exponential complexity of some of its algorithms and the possibility 
of having it freeze in the middle of a process are not very comforting, 
written in a language I don't know.

Mercurial: 
Pros: Incredibly fast; very flexible for external communications; written in a 
language I know.
Cons: I have managed to corrupt my repository doing normal operations; merging 
is always a hassle (i.e. I end up doing a lot of manual merging).



On Tue September 12 2006 13:38, Markus Schiltknecht wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Juan Jose Comellas wrote:
> > Would you recommend using cvsimport instead of tailor to migrate a big
> > CVS repository to Monotone?
>
> I'm trying to improve cvsimport because tailor didn't fit my needs (I
> want branches correctly imported, no changed changelog entries and .. no
> crashes on import ;-).
>
> However, cvsimport is still lacking branch reconstruction. If you only
> need to import the CVS HEAD branch, give it a try.
>
> What repository do you experiment with? An open source one?
>
> Regards
>
> Markus

-- 
Juan Jose Comellas
(address@hidden)