Tailor

Tailor is a program which is designed to convert between many different formats, while cvsps-import is only able to convert from a cvs project into a bzr project. By focusing on just those two formats it is able to achieve a much faster conversion rate, and is also able to convert all branches of a cvs project.

Normal Usage

Most project can be simply imported with:

bzr cvsps-import path/to/cvsroot module output

Obviously this has 3 portions

path/to/cvsroot

This can be a relative or absolute path, but at the moment must be a local path. (:pserver: and :ext: are not yet supported). Underneath this directory should be the cvs control files. Most notably CVSROOT which is how cvs tells that it is a repository. You should be able to cvs -d /absolute/path/to/cvsroot rlog module.

module

The cvs module to converted. This can be "." to convert the entire repository. It can be any path inside the repository (ie it can be a sub-module with "path/to/module").

output

An output directory to store the conversion, and any intermediate information.

When things get tricky

Usually bzr cvsps-import runs cvsps itself with appropriate flags to generate the changeset file. cvsps has some limited support for extracting the log of all revisions. However, sometimes that is insufficient and you need to generate a dump file manually. To do so, create a cvs checkout of the base module (you can checkout just the top-level directory with -l). And then run cvsps from there to generate the dump file.

For example:

cvs -d /path/to/cvsroot co -l module
cd module
cvsps -A -q -u > ../module.dump
cd ..
bzr cvsps-import --cvsps-dump module.dump /path/to/cvsroot module out