cvs-fast-export For Linux

cvs-fast-export is a small, fast, completely free and open source command-line program implemented in C and designed from the offset to help users export CVS (Concurrent Versions System) and RCS (Revision Control System) history as a fast-import stream on GNU/Linux operating systems.

How does it work? Simple, the software will analyze various RCS files in a CVS repository and output the history as a fast-import stream. It is also capable of analyzing a collection of RCS files outside the CVS repository.

Additioncally, the program generate a graph of the resulting commit DAG, in the DOT file format, readable by the Graphviz visualization software suite. However, please note that it doesn’t support all histories and it will notify you about the ones that it cannot render.

Various command-line options are implemented in this tool, which can be viewed in a terminal emulator by running the ‘cvs-fast-export --help’ command. Among these, we can mention the ability to enable keyword expansion, to author map file, to issue CVS-revision properties, to force deterministic dates, to enable load-status reporting, as well as to report committer IDs.

To install and use the cvs-fast-export program on your GNU/Linux operating system, download the latest version from Softpedia or via the project’s homepage (see link at the end of the article), save the archive on your Home directory, unpack it and open a Terminal app.

In the terminal emulator, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/cvs-fast-export-1.29), run the ‘make’ command to compile the program and create the executable, and then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it.

Use the program from the command-line interface by running the ‘cvs-fast-export’ command (see the Command-line options section above for details). In addition to the cvs-fast-export command, the package also contains cvssync, an utility for mirroring masters from remote CVS hosts.