Is there a migration tool from CVS to Git?

Question

I intend to switch over from CVS to Git. In the case of SVN, there seems to be cvs2svn. Is there a similar tool to easily migrate from CVS to Git?

Answer 1

I'm the maintainer of cvs-fast-export. I used to maintain cvsps and parse2cvs and have closely evaluated cvs-fastimport and cvs2git.

CVS to git conversion is a hard, nasty problem with rebarbative edge cases. All the existing conversion tools have known limitations, some quite serious.

I recommend trying cvs-fast-export first. It produces better, faster conversions than anything else, except in rare cases where it fails cleanly and bails out. If you get the rare but dreaded "branch cycle error", try cvs2git.

Do not trust cvs-fastimport, it is quite buggy and often screws up branch joins.

For more, see http://www.catb.org/esr/cvs-fast-export/