3.16 Importing from CVS

Monotone is capable of reading CVS files directly and importing them into a database. This feature is still somewhat immature, but moderately large “real world” CVS trees on the order of 1GB have successfully been imported.

Note however that the machine requirements for CVS trees of this size are not trivial: it can take several hours on a modern system to reconstruct the history of such a tree and calculate the millions of cryptographic certificates involved. We recommend experimenting with smaller trees first, to get a feel for the import process.

We will assume certain values for this example which will differ in your case:

• Your domain name, example.net in this example.
• Your key name, import@example.net in this example.
• Your project name, wobbler in this example.
• Your database name, test.mtn in this example.
• Your CVS repository path, /usr/local/cvsroot in this example.
• The CVS module name for your project, wobbler in this example.

Accounting for these differences at your site, the following is an example procedure for importing a CVS repository “from scratch”, and checking the resulting head version of the import out into a workspace:

$ mtn --db=test.mtn db init
$ mtn --db=test.mtn genkey import@example.net
$ mtn --db=test.mtn --branch=net.example.wobbler cvs_import /usr/local/cvsroot/wobbler
$ mtn --db=test.mtn --branch=net.example.wobbler checkout wobber-checkout