Request for Help: Bulk adding new files to a branch

[Terry Spafford]

I asked for help last week about this, but I didn't get a response. I 
suspect I may not have been clear enough (or else everyone's ignoring me 
now. :)

Anyways, this is the situation I have:

I have a project currently checked into CVS as my main trunk. It has 
lots and lots of files. Previously, this project used to be in another 
CM system, but we have migrated over to CVS.

While it was in the old CM system, many branches were made with the 
code, one for each of our customers basically.

We have decided that we don't care about the history of the files from 
the old CM system, BUT we want the current versions of all those 
branches from the old CM system checked into CVS as branches off of the 
current project. (Since they were all derived from this trunk at some 
point and we want to easily be able to compare them together when needed).

What is the easiest way to do this, considering we're dealing with 
around 2000 files total.

The only method I can think of that will work is as follows:

1. Create a branch with the name I want off of the Trunk filled with the 
current code.
2. Check out that new branch.
3. Clear out the current code from that branch, leaving the CVS directories.
4. Copy over the old code that we wanted.
5. Go throuhg and do a CVS Remove for any files that were in the Trunk 
but not the branch. (TEDIOUS!)
6. Do a CVS add for any files in the branch but not in the Trunk (also 
Tedious)
7. Commit all the files under the new branchname, making sure that no 
merging is done.

This way would work, but I don't like it. It is very tedious and there 
is a good chance stuff will be left out, or left in (both of which would 
be dangerous). Also if there are merges done, the results could be 
unexpected.

Is there an easier way to do this? I've been looking closer at the cvs 
import command and it seems like it might sort've work, but my 
experiments so far are showing some wierd results that make me wary 
until I look at it closer.

Note that we are never expecting to have to merge any of these customer 
branches back onto the Trunk; we just want to be able to compare the 
code CustomerA has with what CustomerB has and make changes to their 
code to fix bugs and/or add improvements as needed/requested.

--
Terry Spafford
Software Engineer
Global Weather Dynamics Inc
Monterey, California, USA
address@hidden
www.gwdi.com