I just tried converting my Debian package CVS repositories, all of which were
constructed and used almost entirely through cvs-buildpackage over the years,
to git using git-cvsimport.  The process I used was something like:

	for pkg in <list of my packages>
	do
		mkdir ~/src/git-packaging/$pkg
		cd ~/src/git-packaging/$pkg

		git-cvsimport -o master -a -A ../author-conv-file $pkg
		git branch -m source-dist upstream
	done

A couple packages had problems for reasons I understand after some reading,
but even a simple package like 'sudo' with a purely linear revision history
that showed no errors during the conversion ended up with a fundamentally
broken git repository.  Using 'diff -u -r' to compare a clean checkout of my
CVS repository to what's in the git repo shows lots of differences, causes
failed builds, etc.  It *appears* that the problem is that some files are
very old versions instead of what I would expect at the head of the development
branch.

I'm not sure what the problem is, and I'm off to investigate parsecvs as
perhaps being better suited to my needs, so I'm probably not going to try
and investigate this further.  Just wanted to report it so that othes will be
very careful to check the results of convering repositories with git-cvsimport
to make sure the results are actually what they expect!

Bdale

severity 474185 important
tags 474185 + wontfix
thanks

Hi Bdale,

Bdale Garbee wrote:

Starting with version 1.6.3, the git-cvsimport(1) man page has a new
nice, loud ISSUES section, but it’s good to have a bug report to warn
people, too.  Thanks.

Kind regards,
Jonathan

# difficult
severity 474185 wishlist
quit

Thanks.  Now the package description says

	Unfortunately, in many situations the import leads to
	incorrect results. For reliable, one-shot imports, cvs2git from the
	cvs2svn package or parsecvs may be a better fit.

so it seems safe to lower the severity.  Keeping the bug because the lack
of a robust incremental import tool from cvs is still unfortunate.