Request for help adding Mercurial output to cvs2svn

[Steve Borho]

On Fri, 2008-02-22 at 22:24 +0100, Michael Haggerty wrote:
> 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.

Any reason not to use the existing Mercurial bundle format?  Is it just
not documented well enough?

-- 
Steve Borho (steve at borho.org)
http://www.borho.org/~steve/steve.asc
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