NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | DEVELOPING AGAINST A SHARED REPOSITORY | SETTING UP A SHARED REPOSITORY | IMPORTING A CVS ARCHIVE | ADVANCED SHARED REPOSITORY MANAGEMENT | PROVIDING CVS ACCESS TO A GIT REPOSITORY | ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT MODELS | SEE ALSO | GIT | NOTES | COLOPHON

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

NAME         top

       gitcvs-migration - Git for CVS users

SYNOPSIS         top

       git cvsimport *

DESCRIPTION         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

           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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

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

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

NOTES         top

        1. Controlling access to branches using update hooks
           file:///usr/local/share/doc/git/howto/update-hook-example.html
        2. The Git User’s Manual
           file:///usr/local/share/doc/git/user-manual.html

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control system)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual page,
       see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on
       2017-07-05.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
       sion of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date
       source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original man‐
       ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.12.0.rc2                   02/18/2017              GITCVS-MIGRATION(7)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1)git-cvsimport(1)git-cvsserver(1)gitcore-tutorial(7)gitglossary(7)gittutorial-2(7)gittutorial(7)