Re: GNU Arch (was: Re: things to do at fri 2004-05-28 meeting ...)

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 12:51:24AM +0200, Joost van Baal wrote:
> On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 04:48:02PM +0200, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
> > On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 02:12:10PM +0200, Joost van Baal wrote:
> > >  - gnu arch
> > 
> > We could start a "study group".
> 
> OK, it's started.

Proposed first action: Go through
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/tutorial/arch.html

Shall this study group be active only on Enosig meetings or shall we
convene, ... say once a week[1]? I get the feeling that with the rate
of enosig meetings, we won't get anywhere anytime soon.x

[1] There surely is an evening without anything interesting on TV ;)

> I've did some searching for a tool to convert a CVS repository to
> Arch.

RobertAnderson writes:

Everybody's first thought about migrating to arch is "I won't do it
until I've got a robust cvs to arch archive translation tool." Well, I
thought so too, once. But I've changed my mind. First of all, such a
tool is devilishly difficult to do right, or maybe arguably,
impossible to do right.

Second, it's not entirely clear that there is a great advantage in
having your history "duplicated" into an arch archive. The history is
still there, you just might have to use cvs to get at it. You
certainly haven't lost anything in doing so, except maybe a little
continuity. In practice, I have not found it to be a burden, and I
have certainly found that attempting to automatically do some kind of
mass conversion is nowhere near worth the price of entry. As a general
suggestion, I would say the best thing to do when considering moving
from cvs to arch is to hedge your bets: keep your CVS archive going,
maybe lessening the intervals at which you check in, and slowly
convert to arch until you've essentially forgotten about your CVS
repo. If you're a single developer, it won't take long. If you're
working on a team, it may take longer for people to catch on. But when
they see what you can do with it, they ought to wise up pretty
quickly.

> I found the tla-cvs-sync script, in the tla-tools Debian package.

But it might botch CVS repositories with branches :-(

> However, I'd rather use a simpler tool: I am not interested in
> maintaining projects in both CVS and Arch format.

Can't you just run the sync one time?

(I've an academic interest in Monotone, too.)