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Migrate from CVS to SVN?

2013-09-21
2013-10-20
  • Paul Walker

    Paul Walker - 2013-09-21

    The project currently uses CVS for the source code repository. Since the project has been dormant for some time, I'm wondering if now might be a good opportunity to migrate it to SVN.

    From what I've read, the general consensus appears to be that there's no good reason not to move to SVN, other than the obvious learning curve for anyone not familiar with it or if you're relying on tools that don't support it. I'm certainly a lot more familiar with SVN than CVS, and I suspect anyone new to SCM tools is also more likely to be learning SVN.

    I understand there are a number of different ways of migrating (see http://cvs2svn.tigris.org/cvs2svn.html). The simplest is just to export the latest version out of CVS and import that into SVN. The downside of this is that all the history is left in CVS. It seems that the tool cvs2svn does allow the repository to be converted as a whole and migrate all the history into SVN. This sounds like the more complete option.

    Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

     
  • Paul Walker

    Paul Walker - 2013-09-22

    Or migrate to Git? My personal preference is SVN because that's what I'm used to, but I know Git is popular...

     
  • Paul Walker

    Paul Walker - 2013-10-02

    As a test, I have taken the CVS repository and converted it to SVN on my local machine (using cvs2svn linked to in my earlier post). I can browse the repository and it looks to have kept all the version history etc. I obviously haven't tried loading it back into Sourceforge yet...

     
  • Bill Pribyl

    Bill Pribyl - 2013-10-09

    Thanks for working on the migration to Subversion. I think it's a good decision.

     
  • Dave Limbaugh

    Dave Limbaugh - 2013-10-10

    Yes, please move to SVN. Git as a bonus would be great, but SVN is still more widely used, probably more so in the Oracle PL/SQL world. As Paul said, should be straightforward.

     
  • Paul Walker

    Paul Walker - 2013-10-13

    In the interest of getting things going, I've made a start on converting to SVN. I feel that is the safest and easiest option at this stage.

     
  • Paul Walker

    Paul Walker - 2013-10-20

    The SVN repository is up and running. I've left the old CVS one up as well for the time being for historical reference, but as far as I can tell, all the history has been migrated into SVN.

     

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