Re: VSS to CVS

[Thomas S. Urban]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 03:14:30PM +0000, Nick A Edwards wrote:
> I am looking for a utility which will allow me to converts a Microsoft
> Visual Source Safe (6.0) to CVS (currently 1.0.6). I need to make sure
> that historic versions are also taken.

I went through this exercise earlier this year.  I used the vss2cvs
perl scripts others have replied with:

http://www.laine.org:8080/cvs/vss2cvs/

The biggest problems I had were:
1 vss2cvs imports everything - I wanted to ignore certain binary files
  and have more control over the import (control recursion, etc.)
2 shared files in VSS got imported into CVS multiple times - indeed,
  you'll probably find that dealing with shares (and broken shares) in
  VSS is the hardest part of the process - I dealt with most of this by
  either restructuring / refactoring code into libraries and the use of
  CVS modules after the import was completed
3 the import can take a long time, mostly because of the above two
  problems

To deal with these problems, I added some features to vss2cvs.pl to deal
with 1 & 2, and wrote some other scripts to deal with the files after
import.  3 is alleviated somewhat by these changes, but it still took a
while for the 11000 files, 38000 revisions I imported.

I sent the changes I made to Laine, but never received any reply nor saw
that he incorporated any changes in his download site.  If you're
interested in them, let me know and I'll send them to you.

Just a warning, depending on how your VSS repository is set up, this
process can be a bit of a PITA.

Scott

-- 
The wages of sin are high but you get your money's worth.