Re: [ft-devel] problems with CVS->git conversion

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> > Would it make sense to first convert to GIT then later change the
>> > commit messages there.
>>
>> I tried that, and it doesn't work properly.
>
> 
> Ah, can you tell me which problem exactly?  I could do the migration
> myself.

First of all, parsecvs is a nice tool, but it is a bit awkward to
compile (Keith has recently applied some fixes to the repository which
I've submitted to him so that it compiles with the git repository
version of git).  A freetype2.git repository created with parsecvs is
just 11.8MByte, BTW, and it has proper tags for everything -- in
particular, it has better tagging than the git archive Suzuki-san has
provided for testing (he used a different tool IIRC).

However, regardless of the used conversion tool, some commit messages
are

  *** empty log message ***

which isn't very meaningful.  I would like to replace them with
something better, depending on the actual changes, of course.  As
mentioned in a previous mail,

   . git format-patch
   . editing commit messages in the *.patch files
   . git am --rebasing --whitespace=nowarn *.patch

works fine, however, it loses all tags created by parsecvs.

On the git mailing list some people suggested to use

  git fast-export > dump

and edit the `dump' file, then calling

  git fast-import

to create a new git repository.  Doing this preserves all tags;
unfortunately, the `dump' file is 650MByte large for freetype2.git,
and it doesn't use a diff-like notation -- I find it very hard to
identify the changes.

I want a tool which collects all *,v files from the CVS and converts
them to `extended' patches which preserves tags.  After fixing the
commit messages they should be converted to a final git.

Perhaps it's easy to make parsecvs do what I want.  I'll examine it
soon.


    Werner