Is there any reasonable way to migrate from subversion to cvs?

Question

My company unwittingly switched from cvs to subversion and now we're all wishing we had cvs back. I know there's tools to migrate history and changes from cvs to svn and there's no equivalent to do the reverse. Any suggestions or ideas on how to do this?

Answer 1

I originally added this as a comment to someone else's answer, but then realized that it was an answer, of sorts. I have done these sorts of transitions before, where there was no existing way to convert from one SCM system to another.

It's not rocket science to write a script that takes the list of commits from your SVN repository, and iterates through them one at a time, merging them into a newly-created CVS repository. Getting all the branches and tags exactly correct might be a bit more work, but if you want to just save revision history for a few branches, it should be pretty easy.

I'm also of the opinion that you won't really gain anything by switching back to CVS, but if you want to do so, then you'll likely be writing your own script. The "svn export" command will undoubtedly be useful in this endeavor.

Answer 2

So what is with SVN that your company dislikes so much and CVS does better? The designers of SVN went out of their way to make the SVN experience fairly similar to CVS. If you use the Tortoise client as a front end the experience is very similar. SVN gives you atomic commits, which while not quite up to the standard of Perforce is miles in front of CVS.

I do have to sympathise with your plight. I upgraded our development team & IT Team from CVS to SVN. I got all the right python scripts to upgrade all the version history and we have been using SVN happily for nearly 4 years. About three months ago the IT Team leader decided to "upgrade" all his projects from SVN to guess what? That's right, the heavy lifter of the version control systems: SourceSafe!

I would definately stick with SVN or even look at some of the newer distributed systems such as Mercurial. With these systems there is no central server. They rely on being able to branch & merge across dozens or hundreds of peers. You define your own topology, so for example, you would specify a particular peer as being the one that performs daily builds.