Hello, I'm seeking some input from git users/developers to try and solve a problem I'm encountering. I'm new with git, having used quite a bit of Subversion and SVK in the past, but have heard good things and decided to give it a try. First, a little bit about what I'm trying to accomplish. There is a large source tree -- FreeBSD to be specific -- which is maintained in CVS. I want to have several local branches where I can develop specific projects. Each of these branches should derive from either the HEAD of the CVS tree, or from one of the release branches (known as the -STABLE branch for a particular version of the OS). That said, I really don't want to have to import the entire CVS repository. It has many, many branches and tags that I'm not interested in, and I really don't need the entire history of the project. I don't even really need individual commit history. I can see that easily enough on cvsweb. Repo size is a big factor as I need to replicate it between several different work machines, some of which don't have unlimited disk space. What I'm currently doing (using SVK) is nightly, taking a snapshot using cvsup of each of the 3 branches that I care about, then using "svk import" to pull the snapshot into a local branch that I treat as a vendor branch. My projects are branched off those and I regularly smerge changes over. It works pretty well for me, the only downside is that svk isn't exactly fast, having to load lots of perl modules for every command. I'd like to do something similar with git -- I like the idea of it having many less dependencies that must be installed, and it's supposed to be quite a bit faster when dealing with working copies. From reading about it I think it may also be easier to generate diffs of my branches from their origins. So far the main snag I've found is that AFAIK there's no equivalent to "svk import" to load a big tree (~37000 files) into a branch and commit the changes. Here's the procedure I've come up with: cd /path/to/git/repo git checkout vendor_branch_X git rm -r . cp -R /path/to/cvs/checkout_X/* ./ git add . git commit -m"Import yyyymmdd snapshot" However this has quite a few disadvantages when compared to svk. The first is that I have to checkout into a working directory and then copy the files from the cvs checkout. It is also considerably slower than svk import, about 7-8 times on average. When there are a lot of changes I've seen the git process use upwards of 1GB of memory; it actually died the first time I tried it because I didn't have any swap configured. Now, I don't have very much experience with git, so for my question: Is there a better way to do this? Either importing a lot of files into git, or a better solution for that I'm trying to do. Any pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks! Craig - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
