Advice/help wanted on bzr fast-export-from-cvs

[Ian Clatworthy]

Michael,

I'm the primary author of bzr-fastimport. I'm pretty sure we've chatted
before re cvs2git and using it to generate fast-import streams for Bazaar?

I've been ill for much of the last year so I haven't been around as
often as I hoped. bzr-fastimport has been on the back burner
accordingly. :-( I'm getting back to consistently good health now and
just in time work wise - Bazaar 2.0 is just around the corner. It should
be an exciting release with a fast-and-efficient storage format, some
cool new GUI tools, better packaging, improved documentation and more!
Everyone will want to start using it ... :-) :-)

In the last few days, I've been working on making migration to Bazaar
via bzr fast-import easier and more reliable. In particular, I've added
4 wrapper scripts that make it dead simple for average users to generate
fast-import dump files from foreign tools:

* bzr fast-export-from-darcs
* bzr fast-export-from-hg
* bzr fast-export-from-git
* bzr fast-export-from-svn

In a nutshell, these commands:

* check required dependencies are installed and tell the user what to
  install if they are missing

* call the bundled or external fast-export scripts using the recommended
  set of options

* all follow the same UI pattern:

  bzr fast-export-from-xxx source-repo dump-file

I'm keen to add fast-export-from-cvs and I need your advice/help to do
that. The other fast-export-from-xxx commands needed 2 small bits of
code to implement:

* a command wrapper than defines the usage and help

* an XxxExporter class rather defines the dependences and have to call
  the underlying script/command that does the actual work.

See
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzr-fastimport/fastimport.dev/annotate/head%3A/exporters/__init__.py
for the existing XxxExporter classes.

So what I need to know is:

1. Are there commonly recommended options that projects ought to use as
   a starting point?

2. How often do users use 'rcs co' vs cvs to access the data?

3. How stable is the code?

4. Is is worth bundling the necessary pieces in bzr-fastimport itself
   rather than asking users to separately install it? (A separate
   install is a minor thing for Ubuntu/Debian users, say, but a PITA
   for Windows users IIUIC.)(#)

5. Does the gnu 'sort' dependency still hold? Is there a good reason for
   needing that versus doing the sorting in Python, say?

Thanks for any advice/help you can offer,
Ian C.

(#): FWIW, bzr-fastimport has bundled versions of hg-fast-export,
svn-fast-export and darcs-fast-export. p4-fast-export may be bundled
soon as well. The high level goal is "fast-export-from-xxx requires xxx
but nothing else", though reality is sometimes more complex than that.