[Monotone-devel] Request for help adding monotone output to cvs2svn [was: cvs_import feature sponsored]

[Michael Haggerty]

Graydon Hoare wrote:
> It probably does not require mentioning, but if possible of course I'd
> encourage you to do this with a clean enough interface to monotone that
> other projects can reuse it.
> 
> While I'm always pleased to have monotone be "best" at something,
> extracting latent structure from a CVS archive is as you know
> research-grade inference work, and if you can condense what you learn
> into a reusable tool it'll probably have greater visibility and longevity.

The tool you are wishing for already exists: cvs2svn [1].  All that is
missing is a backend to output to monotone, but that should be hackable
in a day or two.

cvs2svn is evolving into a generic tool for making sense of CVS
repositories and converting to other SCMs.  I've refactored it
considerably to allow output to other SCMs via output modules, and
recently added an experimental git backend [2] in only one or two days
of work.

cvs2svn is a mature project that is very good at understanding almost
all of CVS's many perversities.  See [3] for a list of cvs2svn's main
features, most of which would be helpful when converting to monotone.
The emphasis is on robust conversions with no data loss, and sensible
translation of CVS idioms.  Its test suite contains an extensive
collection of strange CVS repositories that we have collected over the
years, and cvs2svn can convert all of them.  It includes lots of options
for customizing the conversion.

I'm not a monotone user, but if anybody wants to supply the monotone
expertise, I'd be happy to work together to write a monotone backend for
cvs2svn.  (I've already made this offer to Markus Schiltknecht but he
doesn't seem interested.)  I think it should be easy to get the backend
running in just a day or two.

Volunteers?

Michael

[1] http://cvs2svn.tigris.org
[2] http://marc.info/?l=git&m=118592701426175&w=4
[3] http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html#intro