Diff for "GenericConversion"

(See RepositoryConversion for existing conversion tools)

This describes the basic steps needed to do history conversion from arbitrary formats, as implemented in Mercurial's convert-repo script:

• Group changes into changesets
  • This step is difficult for systems that don't have atomic commits. See cvsps for an example of how this can be done with CVS.
• Associate a unique identifier with each changeset
• Generate the revision graph by finding the parent changesets of each changeset
• Generate a topologically sorted list of changesets such that parents precede their children
• For each changeset:
  • Extract or generate a changeset description, user name, and date
  • Extract a copy of each file changed in the changeset
  • Use the Mercurial rawcommit interface to explicitly commit the changeset
  • Save a correspondence map between source changeset IDs and Mercurial changeset IDs so that the process can be
    • interrupted and resumed
• Convert tags
  • Generate a list of tags and their corresponding source changeset IDs
  • Use the correspondence map to convert tags to Mercurial IDs
  • Write a .hgtags file
  • Commit .hgtags file

Some conversions can be very difficult. It would be worth checking out ProblematicConversions to see how one such conversion was handled.

CategoryConversion