Migration from CVS to SVN

This page contains notes related to GRASS code migration (planned) from CVS to SVN.

Basic

• The SVN command line interface is just like CVS, many tasks are identical- just change the program name from cvs to svn.

Gotchas

• cvs2svn is known to break binary files (images) which were not imported into the CVS with the -kb flag. Luckily Glynn fixed most of these some months ago.

• Files using keyword substitution, such as $Date$ in the description.html files, will have to have support for that enabled manually, once per file (or write a find routine with | xargs svn ...).

$ svn propset svn:keywords "Date" filename.txt
$ svn commit

• how to maintain timestamps of files? We want to keep the last modification date, not the date of local download

Testing SVN repository

Copy of GRASS CVS repository

mkdir grass-cvs
cd grass-cvs
rsync -r --times --links --bwlimit=200 rsync://rsync.intevation.de/grass .
cd ..

(cca 600 MB!)

Creating SVN repository

cvs2svn --use-cvs --no-default-eol  -s grass6svn grass-cvs/grass6
...
Error summary:
ERROR: A CVS repository cannot contain both grass-cvs/grass6/display/d.erase/main.c,v and grass-cvs/grass6/display/d.erase/Attic/main.c,v
ERROR: A CVS repository cannot contain both grass-cvs/grass6/general/g.mapsets/main_inter.c,v and grass-cvs/grass6/general/g.mapsets/Attic/main_inter.c,v
ERROR: A CVS repository cannot contain both grass-cvs/grass6/include/gproj_api.h,v and grass-cvs/grass6/include/Attic/gproj_api.h,v
ERROR: A CVS repository cannot contain both grass-cvs/grass6/visualization/nviz/src/getCat.c,v and grass-cvs/grass6/visualization/nviz/src/Attic/getCat.c,v
Exited due to fatal error(s).

Solution:

• In this case, just remove the "repos/Attic/foo,v"
• cvs2svn FAQ

josef.fsv.cvut.cz

External links

• My Experiences With Subversion by Simon Tatham
• cvs2svn tool page

• Online book: Version Control with Subversion