Re: To get some information regarding CVS

[Michael Haggerty]

Spiro Trikaliotis wrote:
> BTW: Is there any documentation of the format used by CVSNT? As I see,
> cvs2svn still has problems when being used on CVSNT repositories.
> Wouldn't it be a good idea to give the developers a good documentation
> so they can fix these problems (if they want, that is)?

Indeed, cvs2svn/cvs2git does not support CVSNT (though it often mostly
works if you use the --use-cvs option).  And one main reason is that the
CVSNT format is not well documented.  I've also heard rumors that the
format has changed over time, but I don't know if that is true.

I don't think it would be that much work to teach cvs2svn to work with
CVSNT if the format were documented and hasn't evolved too much in
non-backwards-compatible ways.  If anybody wants to add CVSNT support to
cvs2svn/cvs2git, I would be happy to help them.

But who do you suppose would document the format?  CVSNT is IMHO a
project with a mostly commercial character, and the commercial
supporters obviously have no interest in publishing the information that
will help you extract your data from their product and move on to
another VCS.  True, it is open-source, so anybody could in principle
analyze the source code to figure out the format.  But in practice that
is vastly more work than reading decent file format documentation.

This conundrum is one of the strongest reasons that people should think
three times before putting their precious data into a commercial
system--they may get locked in and not be able to get their data back
out again in a reasonable format.

Michael
(the cvs2svn maintainer)