Toshio Kuratomi a.badger@gmail.com wrote:
Jim Meyering wrote:
...
I consider the automated cvs-to-git mirroring to be the first step in any conversion proposal:
First, give people an idea of what they can expect in a git-based dVCS, without requiring any change. It lets people continue to use the tools they're familiar with, and allows the better parts of a dVCS to begin to show up the radar of those who haven't yet had time to explore them.
I don't really buy this because it's a one-way transaction. The people that need to be convinced that there's value in switching to git vs bzr vs hg vs svn also have commit rights to the main repository. For a demo to reach this audience you need to get them the ability to work from this tree. Which means they need to be able to checkout, checkin, tag, and request builds from it.
Hi Toshio,
[didn't we talk at a Mexican place after the fudcon in Boston?]
Using such a mirror need not be a one-way transaction. Obviously, it'd be far less useful if there were such a limitation.
When I do serious work against an upstream CVS repository, I arrange to mirror the CVS repo to git, and do all of my work in git, committing changes on private git branches. Then, I can easily rebase each of those branches (sort of like cvs update), to synchronize with newer upstream changes on the parent branch.[*] When I want to commit to cvs, it's easy to automate using git-cvsexportcommit. While this MO is not as comfortable as working in a git-only environment, it does help give you a feel for what it'd be like, and *I* certainly appreciate it. Of course, this can't help for tag/release-related operations, but it's a good start for the rest.
Even with this slightly-contorted routine, I've appreciated using git: for example, while using conventional diff, patch, and cvs, it's easy to forget to "cvs add" a new file that was added by a patch. It's also easy to forget to apply "chmod a+x..." to a script just added by a patch. But in git, that doesn't happen as much, because the tools do more of the work for you. And git-cvsexportcommit takes care of the details of making sure everything in a git change set makes it back into a cvs "commit".
Jim
[*] In case you haven't seen it yet, "git rebase --interactive" is very useful, if you care about the "perfect patch" sort of process. With it, there's no need for quilt/stgit/etc.