Convert cvs to mercurial

Question

I'm trying to convert a CVS repository to mercurial but can't get it to work.

I start with a clean checkout:

cvs -d :sspi;username=xxx;hostname=yyy.local:/cvsrepos checkout repo

Which works fine

I then do:

hg convert .

But it fails with:

assuming destination .-hg
initializing destination .-hg repository
connecting to :sspi;username=xxx;hostname=yyy.local:/cvsrepos
abort: unexpected response from CVS server (expected "Valid-requests", but got 'E cvs [server aborted]: Root :sspi;username=xxx;hostname=yyy.local:/cvsrepos must be an absolute pathname\n')

I'm running cvsnt on windows 7

Edit:
Investigated this a bit more and it seems like mercurial starts a local server cvs server and then communicates with that instance instead of the remote server.

I base this on the following observations:

1. I created a cvs.bat file that sends the command line arguments to a file. The file shows the argument "server".
2. process monitor shows that hg.exe tries to open the file C:\cvstest\:sspi;username=xxx;hostname=yyy.local:\cvsrepos which of course fails.

Can it be that hg does not understand the sspi connection string?

Edit 2:

Not a solution but I found a workaround: Copy the complete remote repository to my machine and:

cvs -d :local:\localcopyofrepo checkout repo
hg convert repo

Everything worked fine

Answer 1

Looks like the error message is telling you to use an absolute pathname to the repository, try using

hg convert <full_path_including_drive>

rather than the . path on a checked out sandbox of your CVS repository. You could also try specifying the repository type in the convert command by adding -s cvs to the command, the result would look something like this:

hg convert -s cvs C:\sandbox\cvsrepos