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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

gitcvs-migration (7)

Name

gitcvs-migration - Git for CVS users

Synopsis

git cvsimport *

Description

GITCVS-MIGRATION(7)               Git Manual               GITCVS-MIGRATION(7)



NAME
       gitcvs-migration - Git for CVS users

SYNOPSIS
       git cvsimport *


DESCRIPTION
       Git differs from CVS in that every working tree contains a repository
       with a full copy of the project history, and no repository is
       inherently more important than any other. However, you can emulate the
       CVS model by designating a single shared repository which people can
       synchronize with; this document explains how to do that.

       Some basic familiarity with Git is required. Having gone through
       gittutorial(7) and gitglossary(7) should be sufficient.

DEVELOPING AGAINST A SHARED REPOSITORY
       Suppose a shared repository is set up in /pub/repo.git on the host
       foo.com. Then as an individual committer you can clone the shared
       repository over ssh with:

           $ git clone foo.com:/pub/repo.git/ my-project
           $ cd my-project


       and hack away. The equivalent of cvs update is

           $ git pull origin


       which merges in any work that others might have done since the clone
       operation. If there are uncommitted changes in your working tree,
       commit them first before running git pull.

           Note
           The pull command knows where to get updates from because of certain
           configuration variables that were set by the first git clone
           command; see git config -l and the git-config(1) man page for
           details.

       You can update the shared repository with your changes by first
       committing your changes, and then using the git push command:

           $ git push origin master


       to "push" those commits to the shared repository. If someone else has
       updated the repository more recently, git push, like cvs commit, will
       complain, in which case you must pull any changes before attempting the
       push again.

       In the git push command above we specify the name of the remote branch
       to update (master). If we leave that out, git push tries to update any
       branches in the remote repository that have the same name as a branch
       in the local repository. So the last push can be done with either of:

           $ git push origin
           $ git push foo.com:/pub/project.git/


       as long as the shared repository does not have any branches other than
       master.

SETTING UP A SHARED REPOSITORY
       We assume you have already created a Git repository for your project,
       possibly created from scratch or from a tarball (see gittutorial(7)),
       or imported from an already existing CVS repository (see the next
       section).

       Assume your existing repo is at /home/alice/myproject. Create a new
       "bare" repository (a repository without a working tree) and fetch your
       project into it:

           $ mkdir /pub/my-repo.git
           $ cd /pub/my-repo.git
           $ git --bare init --shared
           $ git --bare fetch /home/alice/myproject master:master


       Next, give every team member read/write access to this repository. One
       easy way to do this is to give all the team members ssh access to the
       machine where the repository is hosted. If you don't want to give them
       a full shell on the machine, there is a restricted shell which only
       allows users to do Git pushes and pulls; see git-shell(1).

       Put all the committers in the same group, and make the repository
       writable by that group:

           $ chgrp -R $group /pub/my-repo.git


       Make sure committers have a umask of at most 027, so that the
       directories they create are writable and searchable by other group
       members.

IMPORTING A CVS ARCHIVE
           Note
           These instructions use the git-cvsimport script which ships with
           git, but other importers may provide better results. See the note
           in git-cvsimport(1) for other options.

       First, install version 2.1 or higher of cvsps from
       https://github.com/andreyvit/cvsps and make sure it is in your path.
       Then cd to a checked out CVS working directory of the project you are
       interested in and run git-cvsimport(1):

           $ git cvsimport -C <destination> <module>


       This puts a Git archive of the named CVS module in the directory
       <destination>, which will be created if necessary.

       The import checks out from CVS every revision of every file. Reportedly
       cvsimport can average some twenty revisions per second, so for a
       medium-sized project this should not take more than a couple of
       minutes. Larger projects or remote repositories may take longer.

       The main trunk is stored in the Git branch named origin, and additional
       CVS branches are stored in Git branches with the same names. The most
       recent version of the main trunk is also left checked out on the master
       branch, so you can start adding your own changes right away.

       The import is incremental, so if you call it again next month it will
       fetch any CVS updates that have been made in the meantime. For this to
       work, you must not modify the imported branches; instead, create new
       branches for your own changes, and merge in the imported branches as
       necessary.

       If you want a shared repository, you will need to make a bare clone of
       the imported directory, as described above. Then treat the imported
       directory as another development clone for purposes of merging
       incremental imports.

ADVANCED SHARED REPOSITORY MANAGEMENT
       Git allows you to specify scripts called "hooks" to be run at certain
       points. You can use these, for example, to send all commits to the
       shared repository to a mailing list. See githooks(5).

       You can enforce finer grained permissions using update hooks. See
       Controlling access to branches using update hooks[1].

PROVIDING CVS ACCESS TO A GIT REPOSITORY
       It is also possible to provide true CVS access to a Git repository, so
       that developers can still use CVS; see git-cvsserver(1) for details.

ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT MODELS
       CVS users are accustomed to giving a group of developers commit access
       to a common repository. As we've seen, this is also possible with Git.
       However, the distributed nature of Git allows other development models,
       and you may want to first consider whether one of them might be a
       better fit for your project.

       For example, you can choose a single person to maintain the project's
       primary public repository. Other developers then clone this repository
       and each work in their own clone. When they have a series of changes
       that they're happy with, they ask the maintainer to pull from the
       branch containing the changes. The maintainer reviews their changes and
       pulls them into the primary repository, which other developers pull
       from as necessary to stay coordinated. The Linux kernel and other
       projects use variants of this model.

       With a small group, developers may just pull changes from each other's
       repositories without the need for a central maintainer.

SEE ALSO
       gittutorial(7), gittutorial-2(7), gitcore-tutorial(7), gitglossary(7),
       giteveryday(7), The Git User's Manual[2]

GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite

NOTES
        1. Controlling access to branches using update hooks
           git-htmldocs/howto/update-hook-example.html

        2. The Git User's Manual
           git-htmldocs/user-manual.html



Git 2.36.0                        04/17/2022               GITCVS-MIGRATION(7)