[Monotone-devel] newbie: Life after cvs-import

[Kelly F. Hickel]

Hello,

(insert boilerplate reason for asking about mtn)
>       We're looking at possibly converting from CVS to MTN by the end
of 
> the year, and I have some questions.  

We're trying to decide whether to start life in mtn by cvs-importing the
universe, or skimming the trunk and creating a new mtn database from
that (no cvs-import at all). I'm in the cvs-import everything camp, my
coworker feels the other way, primarily because of some bad experiences
trying to import from cvs to subversion.

When we imported from cvs to svn, there were a number of branches that
svn complained weren't properly created in cvs and it couldn't figure
out what to do with them. We investigated the branches and found that
svn was correct, they weren't "right", so we excluded those branches,
one by one, until the import succeeded.  Later, while using viewvc to
view the results of the import, it complained that various things about
the svn repo were broken, basically svn didn't create a valid repo, even
after excluding the branches it complained about.

All that back history leads to some questions:

1) SVN was right, some of the branches were badly created, why didn't
monotone complain about these? Did it figure out "the right thing"?  (I
no longer have the branch names in question, so I'm probably going to
have to redo the import just to get some broken branch names and then
look at them in viewmtn).

2) How can we be reasonably certain that mtn imported useful things from
cvs? My coworker is of the opinion that since importing everything leads
to a big database (1gb), and we can't be sure it imported "everything
correctly" that we're better off junking all the history, that way
nothing will bite us in the end. 


More general cvs-import questions:

3) Is there any way to determine the cvs revision number from monotone
after the import?  E.g. I'm looking at something in monotone, and I need
to refer back to the change in my archived cvs repo, just to sanity
check it.  It would be nice if cvs-import added some kind of info cert
specifying the cvs revision number, since it is available at cvs-import
time.

4) We're used to using bonsai and viewvc.  I don't believe that either
of these could be made to work with mtn because I believe they both
require a dotted-style revision number.  So, I've been looking at
viewmtn, and I don't see an easy way to do some of the things that we
did in bonsai/viewvc.  For instance, I'd often find myself using bonsai
to see who committed changes in the last few hours (on any branch), I
don't see a way to do that. The Selector syntax in the command line tool
seems pretty powerful, but I don't see a way to do that with viewmtn.
        

-- 
Kelly F. Hickel
Senior Software Architect
MQSoftware, Inc
952.345.8677
address@hidden