cvs-fast-export

cvs-fast-export is a small, fast, completely free and open source command-line program implemented in C and designed from the offset to help users export CVS (Concurrent Versions System) and RCS (Revision Control System) history as a fast-import stream on GNU/Linux operating systems.

Analyzes several RCS files in a CVS repo

How does it work? Simple, the software will analyze various RCS files in a CVS repository and output the history as a fast-import stream. It is also capable of analyzing a collection of RCS files outside the CVS repository.

Additioncally, the program generate a graph of the resulting commit DAG, in the DOT file format, readable by the Graphviz visualization software suite. However, please note that it doesn’t support all histories and it will notify you about the ones that it cannot render.

Command-line options

Various command-line options are implemented in this tool, which can be viewed in a terminal emulator by running the ‘cvs-fast-export --help’ command. Among these, we can mention the ability to enable keyword expansion, to author map file, to issue CVS-revision properties, to force deterministic dates, to enable load-status reporting, as well as to report committer IDs.

Getting started with cvs-fast-export

To install and use the cvs-fast-export program on your GNU/Linux operating system, download the latest version from Softoware or via the project’s homepage (see link at the end of the article), save the archive on your Home directory, unpack it and open a Terminal app.

In the terminal emulator, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softoware/cvs-fast-export-1.29), run the ‘make’ command to compile the program and create the executable, and then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it.

Use the program from the command-line interface by running the ‘cvs-fast-export’ command (see the Command-line options section above for details). In addition to the cvs-fast-export command, the package also contains cvssync, an utility for mirroring masters from remote CVS hosts.

What is new in this release:

• A significant improvement in the correctness of vendor-branch handling. More speed improvements.

What is new in version 1.7:

• Allow # in symbol names.
• Addresses a corner case in the NetBSD repository.

What is new in version 1.6:

• Fix a brown-paper-bag bug in cvssync.

What is new in version 1.4:

• Optimization to call sbrk() less often needs to be conditioned on GCC.

What is new in version 1.3:

• Improved performance of masters with lots of symbols; thank Jens Bethkowsky.

What is new in version 1.2:

• Smarter blob directory creation to reduce search overhead for blobs.

What is new in version 1.1:

• Cope with CVS-NT kopt strings containing garbage binary data.

What is new in version 1.0:

• Bug fix: Non-top-level .cvsignores are now converted.
• More speed and significant lowering of memory usage.
• Most error messages are now explained on the manual page.

What is new in version 0.8:

• Processing speed has approximately tripled since last release.
• cvs-fast-export has save progress metering again.
• cvssync can now take a CVS URL argument.