One particular suckage of CVS is very hard to work around: CVS is
basically a tool for tracking _file_ history, while git is a tool for
tracking _project_ history. This sometimes causes problems if you are
-used to doign very strange things in CVS, in particular if you're doing
+used to doing very strange things in CVS, in particular if you're doing
things like making branches of just a subset of the project. Git can't
track that, since git never tracks things on the level of an individual
file, only on the whole project level.
working directories _are_ the repositories. However, you can easily
emulate the CVS model by having one special "global repository", which
people can synchronize with. See details later, but in the meantime
-just keep in mind that with git, every checked out working tree will be
-a full revision control of its own.
+just keep in mind that with git, every checked out working tree will
+have a full revision control history of its own.
Importing a CVS archive
any more familiar with it, but make sure it is in your path. After that,
the magic command line is
- git cvsimport <cvsroot> <module>
+ git cvsimport -v -d <cvsroot> <module> <destination>
which will do exactly what you'd think it does: it will create a git
-archive of the named CVS module. The new archive will be created in a
-subdirectory named <module>.
+archive of the named CVS module. The new archive will be created in the
+subdirectory named <destination>; it'll be created if it doesn't exist.
+Default is the local directory.
-It can take some time to actually do the conversion for a large archive,
-and the conversion script can be reasonably chatty, but on some not very
-scientific tests it averaged about eight revisions per second, so a
-medium-sized project should not take more than a couple of minutes.
+It can take some time to actually do the conversion for a large archive
+since it involves checking out from CVS every revision of every file,
+and the conversion script is reasonably chatty unless you omit the '-v'
+option, but on some not very scientific tests it averaged about twenty
+revisions per second, so a medium-sized project should not take more
+than a couple of minutes. For larger projects or remote repositories,
+the process may take longer.
+
+After the (initial) import is done, the CVS archive's current head
+revision will be checked out -- thus, you can start adding your own
+changes right away.
+
+The import is incremental, i.e. if you call it again next month it'll
+fetch any CVS updates that have been happening in the meantime. The
+cut-off is date-based, so don't change the branches that were imported
+from CVS.
+
+You can merge those updates (or, in fact, a different CVS branch) into
+your main branch:
+
+ cg-merge <branch>
+
+The HEAD revision from CVS is named "origin", not "HEAD", because git
+already uses "HEAD". (If you don't like 'origin', use cvsimport's
+'-o' option to change it.)
Emulating CVS behaviour
CVS annotate
------------
-The core GIT itself does not have a "cvs annotate" equivalent.
-It has something that you may want to use when you would use
-"cvs annotate".
+So, something has gone wrong, and you don't know whom to blame, and
+you're an ex-CVS user and used to do "cvs annotate" to see who caused
+the breakage. You're looking for the "git annotate", and it's just
+claiming not to find such a script. You're annoyed.
+
+Yes, that's right. Core git doesn't do "annotate", although it's
+technically possible, and there are at least two specialized scripts out
+there that can be used to get equivalent information (see the git
+mailing list archives for details).
+
+Git has a couple of alternatives, though, that you may find sufficient
+or even superior depending on your use. One is called "git-whatchanged"
+(for obvious reasons) and the other one is called "pickaxe" ("a tool for
+the software archeologist").
+
+The "git-whatchanged" script is a truly trivial script that can give you
+a good overview of what has changed in a file or a directory (or an
+arbitrary list of files or directories). The "pickaxe" support is an
+additional layer that can be used to further specify exactly what you're
+looking for, if you already know the specific area that changed.
Let's step back a bit and think about the reason why you would
want to do "cvs annotate a-file.c" to begin with.
projects / git.git / blobdiff