repository adjustment alternatives -- surgery vs. re-creation

[Ted Stern]

Hi all,

I have taken over management of a CVS repository that was never
correctly managed.  For example,

  - It is tracking 3rd party sources but never used a consistent
    vendor branch tag for imports.  In fact, only one 'import' was done,
    the initial one, and the vendor was called 'start'.

  - They didn't understand branches, so "1.2" versions were created
    for an important branch but never used.

  - For branching, they made a copy of the entire repository into a
    new module.

  - inconsistent branch/tag naming conventions.

I've tried creating my own "reassembled" new repository.  I have
imported things correctly and created branches.  So everything should
be fine, right?  As a nice side effect, I've removed a bit of cruft
from intermediate versions that weren't relevant.  I've even written a
little perl script that can go into each comma-v file and change tag
names without touching the rest of the file (and it saves access and
mod times).

But one thing is missing: the cvs log timestamps.  All the 'date' info
in the comma-v files is dated over the last couple of weeks that I've
been working on this.  Losing date info is repugnant to my users,
since they like to see when each change occurred.

So I'm wondering whether I should consider taking the original
repository and perform plastic surgery to attach branches, a daunting
undertaking to say the least.

One thing I thinking of is checking out the old-repository version at
various tag points, checking the timestamps, searching for the
corresponding tag point in my new repository ,v file and copying the
'date' timestamp.  But this seems obvious enough that perhaps somebody
run into this before and written a script to handle it. :-)

Any suggestions?

PS:
host for repository reconstruction: cvs 1.11.2  Redhat 9
pserver host target:                cvs 1.11.6  IRIX64 6.5

[No, I can't upgrade CVS--I'm constrained by company software support
policy and host availablility, which is quite strict and limiting].

Thanks very much for your time,

Ted
-- 
 dodecatheon at gmail dot com
 Frango ut patefaciam -- I break so that I may reveal