Re: CVSNT versus CVS

[Vinod Damaraju]

Arthur,

Greatly appreciate your reply. As you pointed out in Note1, what I am doing 
is indeed 'porting', if that is the right word, where VSS DB is queried for 
actions on files and those actions are replayed on a CVS repository with 
appropriate CVS commands. The platform and CVS versions I am using as I 
detailed in my first post are things which I have to 'work with' and 
therefore have to work within those constraints. Interesting to note your 
comment on how both CVSNT and CVS handle RCS files. I did not have any 
specific questions for CVSNT user group and thus I posted my questions to 
this user group, which I thought would be CVS support.

Regards
Vinod
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arthur Barrett" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>; <address@hidden>
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 7:28 PM
Subject: RE: CVSNT versus CVS


Vinod Damaraju,

> I have been involved in converting our source
> code repository in Visual Source Safe (VSS)
> to CVS <snip>

Note1: it is not possible to convert from any SCM to any other - you can
extract the information from one SCM tool and import it into another,
but since each SCM tool has features specific to them it is not really a
'conversion' - more a 'porting'.

Note2: CVSNT (GPL/Free like CVS and runs on Unix/Linux/Mac etc) has some
features that more closely resemble VSS features (eg: files can be added
as either "concurrent" or as "reserved").

Note3: The company that is the primary contributor to CVSNT (which I
work for) also provide a Visual Studio Integration component for CVSNT
for a small charge - see cvsnt.com.

> Apart from this what other changes are there
> in the ",v" file format between CVSNT and CVS?

As Larry already pointed out - a simple explanation is that CVSNT RCS
files are not compatible with CVS (however CVSNT can read CVS RCS files
and converts them dynamically to CVSNT RCS files).  In fact CVS and
CVSNT both use the RCS specification for these files which allows for
each application to expand the use of the format - what is happening
with CVS is that it is doing its best to ignore the parts of the RCS
file that it does not use and the result is (generally) that it doesn't
work.

CVSNT uses these extra attibutes to do things like binary deltas,
rename, change sets (what SVN calls atomic commits), bug tracking (user
defined changesets), merge tracking etc etc.

There is a separate newsgroup for CVSNT - if you have CVSNT specific
questions  please ask on the CVSNT newsgroup.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett