Re: SVN for src (was Re: Binutils 2.18 prep)

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>]

Andrew STUBBS <andrew.stubbs@st.com> writes:

> I would suggest now that the real problem is how to convert CVS to
> SVN. I haven't even got a clue how that could be done. The GCC project
> managed it, but I imagine that it will take a CVS expert some time to
> get that mammoth process completed.

The gcc conversion, which was done by Daniel Berlin, had two
interesting parts.  The first was that the gcc repository was very
large with a lot of revisions, and the conversion process took more
than two days on a powerful system.  The second was that we wanted to
include older gcc version data from the FSF RCS files which were not
in the CVS repository.  I wrote some hacks to include the RCS revision
history in a copy of the CVS repository before the revision.

I would very much like to do the same thing with the old Cygnus
binutils repository at Red Hat.  The problem is the customer
confidential code in the Cygnus repository.  However, we would only be
interested in the Cygnus repository up to the point when the
sourceware repository was created, in May 1999.  When I was at Cygnus
we always wrote our contracts to say that confidential information
could be released when the customer specified or after three years had
passed.  So, unless they changed that policy after I left in 1998, an
eight year lag should be legally OK.

Nick, could you see if you can get permission to release the
binutils/gdb/newlib/cygwin revision history from the Cygnus repository
up through May, 1999?  If you can, I'll work on incorporating that
revision history into the sourceware repository.

I think that would be very convenient for future development.

Ian