Request for help adding Mercurial output to cvs2svn

[Michael Haggerty]

Another, perhaps more sensible way to help conversions to Mercurial
would be if Mercurial would offer a "hg-fast-import" tool similar to
git-fast-import [1] and bzr-fastimport (which was just announced on the
bazaar mailing list):

Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> I'm pleased to announce bzr-fastimport, a plugin useful for loading
> data exported by a large number of foreign VCS tools. Places to start
> are:
>
> * the Launchpad page - https://launchpad.net/bzr-fastimport
> * the Wiki page - http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrFastImport.
>
> Please note that this is not yet production quality but seems to be
> working well enough to be useful for a large number of projects.
> [...]

These tools accept data in a well-defined and well-documented serialized
stream format and load it into the corresponding VCS.  The formats
consumed by git-fast-import and bzr-fastimport are largely compatible.
Since cvs2svn can already generate git-fast-import output, the new
Bazaar tool has effectively just added a "cvs2bzr" mode to cvs2svn and
to other similar conversion tools.

(Subversion has an analogous "dump" format, which is used by cvs2svn
when converting to Subversion.)

Wouldn't it be great if the Mercurial project would develop an
hg-fast-import tool?  That way the part of the conversion process that
is tightly connected to Mercurial itself could be maintained by the
Mercurial project, and I could devote my energy to tweaking the stream
output of cvs2svn to best match the things that are different between
Mercurial and git/bzr.  Ideally, hg-fast-import would accept a stream
format as similar as possible to git-fast-import's.

I haven't been psyched about trying to tie cvs2svn so intimately to
Mercurial and having to track Mercurial changes, all from within a
separate project.  This seems like a very good way to decouple the
programs and make the combination much more maintainable.

Anybody interested?

Michael

[1] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-fast-import.html